| As spring slides into summer many have not stopped to think about what lies ahead this autumn. However, Portugal’s local elections (autárquicas) will be taking place in October across the country and it may not be known by the majority of foreigners that they may have a right to vote. According to information provided by afpop, the largest foreigners association in the country, European Union citizens, as well as individuals from Portuguese-speaking countries, who have been in the possession of a residence card (Cartão de Residência) for two years and live in Portugal, are eligible to vote and may register at their local parish council. Citizens from Argentina, Israel, Norway, Peru and Uruguay are also allowed to vote, as long as they hold the necessary documents and have lived in Portugal for at least three years. To register, foreigners must visit their local parish council up to 60 days before the elections take place. EU citizens are asked to take their valid residence card and passport (required at some offices) and request to be placed on the Electoral Register. The staff in the parish council will fill out the form and ask the soon-to-be voters to return when the voter’s card (Cartão de Eleitor) is ready. If a transfer from another town is needed, then the foreigner’s previous voter’s card or electoral number will be required, as well as the name of the constituency. Then, a registration or transfer form will have to be filled in. Foreigners will be entitled to their voter’s card, which contains the name, voter’s number and constituency of its owner if all is done correctly. The power of the expatriate vote, especially in a region like the Algarve with such a vast foreign community, has only recently begun to be taken into account. However, recent local elections have seen councils acknowledge their importance and have started nominating foreign representatives to attract their vote and encourage them to participate. The Algarve Resident will be updating readers about the various candidates running for mayoral positions in both municipal authorities (Câmaras Municipais) and its parishes (Juntas de Freguesia). This week we introduce you to the PSD candidate campaigning for the post of president of Almancil parish council. |
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Foreigners vote in local elections
Saturday, June 22, 2013
NACIONALIZAÇÕES À VISTA
“Nacionalizações à vista”
Para grandes problemas, grandes soluções.
O Governo tem já no curriculum vitae, dois Orçamentos de
Estado chumbados, estamos no decorrer do mês de Junho, e as alterações ao
Orçamento Retificativo ainda não forma elaboradas e muito menos discutidas no
Parlamento; daí que o Governo possa negar-se a efetuar o pagamento dos
subsídios de férias à Função Pública, dando-lhe jeito que se protele o
Orçamento de Estado definitivo, porque assim não tem compromissos políticos em
falta, e a margem de incerteza económica é de tal maneira grave, que penso até
que exista uma espécie de acordo secreto para a manutenção do status quo,
envolvendo o PCP e o BE, pactuado com os Partidos Políticos no Governo e com os
socialistas, para que a indefinição orçamental se mantenha, no sentido que seja
viável e possível o 2.º resgate a Portugal.
Queria cortar caminho nas razões pelas quais as
nacionalizações virão a grande velocidade para o tabuleiro político, que já se
sabem sobremaneira. Por um lado o caso BPN, foi um exemplo de uma
nacionalização feita á liberal “entalado”, que compra um passivo financeiro
gigante e depois vende a qualquer preço, sendo que esse diferencial entre o que
o Estado perdeu na compra do Banco e o que encaixou com a venda, foi o início
do Titanic.
Ao que parece, e já estou receosa que seja a esquerda
populista e mais a dita radical, a executar a “salvação nacional”, dado que
ainda temos empresas coim participações estatais que são diamantes.
Nomeadamente os 11% do estado na REN (Rede Elétrica Nacional), que o Governo
PSD com olhar guloso pensa já em dispersar essa mesma participação pública. No
entanto, várias questões se colocam nas secretárias do Poder : a descida de
juros provoca uma subida do preço alvo por ação na ordem de uma valorização de
20,3%. Ora, a REN tem uma carteira de ações na Bolsa de Valores de 5,2% que
representa um número aproximado de 80 milhões de euros ( logo se 5% estão para
80 milhões €, 100% estão para 16 mil milhões €), atrativo sem dúvida para
qualquer Governo que se queira salvar do pesadelo e do afogamento do défice
público; por outro lado, sendo a Rede Elétrica Nacional, fundamental para a
independência e segurança nacional, e tendo previsto em Plano de Investimentos
3.200 mil milhões €, sendo que 900 milhões € estavam destinados à rede de
transportes e armazenamento de Gás natural, ponto essencial de várias linhas
políticas desenhadas na última década respeitantes a negociações bilaterais, a
começar coma Espanha, e depois com os países do Magreb, alienar portanto a
participação pública desenha-se uma possibilidade entre mãos, quer estejam
incluídas as subsidiárias associadas à REN, como a atividade de exploração de
minerais (Também de interesse estratégico), com as minas de ouro no Alto
Alentejo, ou a Rede Ecológica Nacional, que recebe prioritariamente fundos
europeus de relevância económica para o desenvolvimento sustentável. O negócio
da alienação da participação do Estado na REN é bem possível que se concretize,
mas é igualmente possível que logo a seguir se proceda à nacionalização da
empresa. E é este o xadrez que pode salvar o Governo da agonia, mas muito sublimemente
com o concordo da Oposição.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
MADELEIN MCANN
![[Image]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tvgPO1y6fcvsLH6E1xGXla3N2twkHlbe0e-6omXeC0RTG0jSbOEkA2Y1YTwHJNpWuOrrZsr7xFvqOqVmTxV1LOQQTOe3ZecwuxpXxr7x8xcA=s0-d)
The following text is an unredacted version retrieved from Google cache, with redacted text in red identifying a former undercover police officer who worked with MI5. See other hosts of this via Google on "Henri Exton."
September 25, 2009
Mark Hollingsworth Investigates The McCann Files
Disillusioned with the Portuguese police, Gerry and Kate McCann turned to private detectives to find their missing daughter. Instead the efforts of the private eyes served only to scare off witnesses, waste funds and raise false hopes. Mark Hollingsworth investigates the investigators.
by Mark Hollingsworth
It was billed as a ‘significant development’ in the exhaustive search for Madeleine McCann. At a recent dramatic press conference in London, the lead private investigator David Edgar, a retired Cheshire detective inspector, brandished an E-FIT image of an Australian woman, described her as ‘a bit of a Victoria Beckham lookalike’, and appealed for help in tracing her. The woman was seen ‘looking agitated’ outside a restaurant in Barcelona three days after Madeleine’s disappearance. ‘It is a strong lead’, said Edgar, wearing a pin-stripe suit in front of a bank of cameras and microphones. ‘Madeleine could have been in Barcelona by that point. The fact the conversation took place near the marina could be significant.’
But within days reporters discovered that the private detectives had failed to make the most basic enquiries before announcing their potential breakthrough. Members of Edgar’s team who visited Barcelona had failed to speak to anyone working at the restaurant near where the agitated woman was seen that night, neglected to ask if the mystery woman had been filmed on CCTV cameras and knew nothing about the arrival of an Australian luxury yacht just after Madeleine vanished.
The apparent flaws in this latest development were another salutary lesson for Kate and Gerry McCann, who have relied on private investigators after the Portuguese police spent more time falsely suspecting the parents than searching for their daughter. For their relations with private detectives have been frustrating, unhappy and controversial ever since their daughter’s disappearance in May 2007.
The search has been overseen by the millionaire business Brian Kennedy, 49, who set up Madeleine’s Fund: Leaving No Stone Unturned, which aimed ‘to procure that Madeleine’s abduction is thoroughly investigated’. A straight-talking, tough, burly self-made entrepreneur and rugby fanatic, he grew up in a council flat near Tynecastle in Scotland and was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness. He started his working life as a window cleaner and by 2007 had acquired a £350 million fortune from double-glazing and home-improvement ventures. Kennedy was outraged by the police insinuations against the McCanns and, though a stranger, worked tirelessly on their behalf. ‘His motivation was sincere,’ said someone who worked closely with him. ‘He was appalled by the Portuguese police, but he also had visions of flying in by helicopter to rescue Madeleine.’
Kennedy commissioned private detectives to conduct an investigation parallel to the one run by the Portuguese police. But his choice showed how dangerous it is when powerful and wealthy businessmen try to play detective. In September 2007, he hired Metodo 3, an agency based in Barcelona, on a six-month contract and paid it an estimated £50,000 a month. Metodo 3 was hired because of Spain’s ‘language and cultural connection’ with Portugal. ‘If we’d had big-booted Brits or, heaven forbid, Americans, we would have had doors slammed in our faces’ said Clarence Mitchell, spokesperson for the McCann’s at the time. ‘And it’s quite likely that we could have been charged with hindering the investigation as technically it’s illegal in Portugal to undertake a secondary investigation.
The agency had 35 investigators working on the case in Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Morocco. A hotline was set up for the public to report sightings and suspicions, and the search focussed on Morocco. But the investigation was dogged by over-confidence and braggadocio. ‘We know who took Madeleine and hope she will be home by Christmas,’ boasted Metodo 3’s flamboyant boss Francisco Marco. But no Madeleine materialised and their contract was not renewed.
Until now, few details have emerged about the private investigation during those crucial early months, but an investigation by ES shows that key mistakes were made, which in turn made later enquiries far more challenging.
ES has spoken to several sources close to the private investigations that took place in the first year and discovered that:
* The involvement of Brian Kennedy and his son Patrick in the operation was counter-productive, notably when they were questioned by the local police for acting suspiciously while attempting a 24-hour ‘stake out’.
* The relationship between Metodo 3 and the Portuguese police had completely broken down.
* Key witnesses were questioned far too aggressively, so much so that some of them later refused to talk to the police.
* Many of the investigators had little experience of the required painstaking forensic detective work.
By April 2008, nearing the first anniversary of the disappearance, Kennedy and the McCanns were desperate. And so when Henri Exton, a formerundercover police officer who worked on MI5 operations, and Kevin Halligen, a smooth-talking Irishman who claimed to have worked for covert British government intelligence agency GCHQ, walked through the door, their timing was perfect. Their sales pitch was classic James Bond spook-talk: everything had to be ‘top secret’ and ‘on a need to know basis’. The operation would involve 24-hour alert systems, undercover units, satellite imagery and round-the-clock surveillance teams that would fly in at short notice. This sounded very exciting but, as one source close to the investigation told ES, it was also very expensive and ultimately unsuccessful. ‘The real job at hand was old-fashioned, tedious, forensic police work rather than these boy’s own, glory boy antic,’ he said.
But Kennedy was impressed by the license-to-spy presentation and Exton and Halligen were hire for a fee of £100,000 per month plus expenses. Ostensibly, the contract was with Halligen’s UK security company, Red Defence International Ltd, and an office was set up in Jermyn Street, in St James’s. Only a tiny group of employees did the painstaking investigative work of dealing with thousands of emails and phone calls. Instead, resources were channelled into undercover operations in paedophile rings and among gypsies throughout Europe, encouraged by Kennedy. A five-mansurveillance team was dispatched in Portugal, overseen by the experienced Exton, for six weeks.
Born in Belgium in 1951, Exton had been a highly effective undercover officer for the Manchester police. A maverick and dynamic figure, he successfully infiltrated gangs of football hooligans in the 1980’s. While not popular among his colleagues, in 1991 he was seconded to work on MI5 undercover operations against drug dealers, gangsters and terrorists, and was later awarded the Queen’s Police Medal for ‘outstanding bravery’. By all accounts, the charismatic Exton was a dedicated officer. But in November 2002, the stress appeared to have overcome his judgement when he was arrested for shoplifting.
While working on an MI5 surveillance, Exton was caught leaving a tax-free shopping area at Manchester airport with a bottle of perfume he had not paid for. The police were called and he was given the option of the offence being dealt with under caution or to face prosecution. He chose a police caution and so in effect admitted his guilt. Exton was sacked, but was furious about the way he had been treated and threatened to sue MI5. He later set up his own consulting company and moved to Bury in Lancashire.
While Exton, however flawed, was the genuine article as an investigator, Halligen was a very different character. Born in Dublin in 1961, he has been described as a ‘Walter Mitty figure’. He used false names to collect prospective clients at airports in order to preserve secrecy, and he called himself ‘Kevin’ or ‘Richard’ or ‘Patrick’ at different times to describe himself to business contacts. There appears to be no reason for all this subterfuge except that he thought this was what agents did. A conspiracy theorist and lover of the secret world, he is obsessed by surveillance gadgets and even installed a covert camera to spy on his own employees. He claimed to have worked for GCHQ, but in fact he was employed by the Atomic Energy Authority (AEA) as head of defence systems in the rather less glamorous field of new information technology, researching the use of ‘special batteries’. He told former colleagues and potential girlfriends that he used to work for MI5, MI6 and the CIA. He also claimed that he was nearly kidnapped by the IRA, was involved in the first Gulf War and had been a freefall parachutist.
Very little of this is true. What is true is that Halligen has a degree in electronics, worked on the fringes of the intelligence community while at AEA and does understand government communications. He could also be an astonishingly persuasive, engaging and charming individual. Strikingly self-confident and articulate, he could be generous and clubbable. ‘He was very good company but only when it suited him’ says one friend. He kept people in compartments.’
After leaving the AEA, Halligen set up Red Defence International Ltd as an international security and political risk company, advising clients on the risks involved in investing and doing business in unstable, war-torn and corrupt countries. He worked closely with political risk companies and was a persuasive advocate of IT security. In 2006, he struck gold when hired by Trafigura, the Dutch commodities trading company. Executives were imprisoned in the Ivory Coast after toxic waste was dumped in landfills near its biggest city Abidjan. Trafigura was blamed and hired Red Defence International at vast expense to help with the negotiations to release its executives. A Falcon business jet was rented for several months during the operation and it was Halligen’s first taste of the good life. The case only ended when Trafigura paid $197 million to the government of the Ivory Coast to secure the release of the prisoners.
Halligen made a fortune from Trafigura and was suddenly flying everywhere first-class, staying at the Lansborough and Stafford hotels in London and The Willard hotel in Washington DC for months at a time. In 2007 he set up Oakley International Group and registered at the offices of the prestigious law firm Patton Boggs, in Washington DC, as an international security company. He was now strutting the stage as a self-proclaimed international spy expert and joined the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, where he met Exton.
During the Madeleine investigation, Halligen spent vast amounts of time in the HeyJo bar in the basement of the Abracadabra Club near his Jermyn Street office. Armed with a clutch of unregistered mobile phones and a Blackberry, the bar was in effect his office. ‘He was there virtually the whole day,’ a former colleague told ES. ‘He had an amazing tolerance for alcohol and a prodigious memory and so occasionally he would have amazing bursts of intelligence, lucidity and insights. They were very rare but they did happen.’
When not imbibing in St James’s, Halligen was in the United States, trying to drum up investors for Oakley International. On 15 August 2008, at the height of the McCann investigation crisis, he persuaded Andre Hollis, a former US Drug enforcement agency official, to write out an $80,000 cheque to Oakley in return for a ten per cent share-holding. The money was then transferred into the private accounts of Halligen and his girlfriend Shirin Trachiotis to finance a holiday in Italy, according to Hollis. In a $6 million lawsuit filed in Fairfax County, Virginia, Hollis alleges that Halligen ‘received monies for Oakley’s services rendered and deposited the same into his personal accounts’ and ‘repeatedly and systematically depleted funds from Oakley’s bank accounts for inappropriate personal expenses’.
Hollis was not the only victim. Mark Aspinall, a respected lawyer who worked closely with Halligen, invested £500,000 in Oakley and lost the lot. Earlier this year he filed a lawsuit in Washington DC against Halligen claiming $1.4 million in damages. The finances of Oakley International are in chaos and numerous employees, specialist consultants and contractors have not been paid. Some of them now face financial ruin.
Meanwhile, Exton was running the surveillance teams in Portugal and often paying his operatives upfront, so would occasionally be out-of-pocket because Halligen had not transferred funds. Exton genuinely believed that progress was being made and substantial and credible reports on child trafficking were submitted. But by mid-August 2008, Kennedy and Gerry McCann were increasingly concerned by an absence of details of how the money was being spent. At one meeting, Halligen was asked how many men constituted a surveillance team and he produced a piece of paper on which he wrote ‘between one and ten’. But he then refused to say how many were working and how much they were being paid.
While Kennedy and Gerry McCann accepted that the mission was extremely difficult and some secrecy was necessary, Halligen was charging very high rates and expenses. And eyebrows were raised when all the money was paid to Oakley International, solely owned and managed by Halligen. One invoice, seen by ES, shows that for ‘accrued expenses to May 5, 2008’ (just one month into the contract), Oakley charged $74,155. The ‘point of contact’ was Halligen who provided a UK mobile telephone number.
While Kennedy was ready to accept Halligen at face value, Gerry McCann sharp, focused and intelligent was more sceptical. The contract with Oakley International and Halligen was terminated by the end of September 2008, after £500,000-plus expenses had been spent.
For the McCanns it was a bitter experience, Exton has returned to Cheshire and, like so many people, is owed money by Halligen. As for Halligen, he has gone into hiding, leaving a trail of debt and numerous former business associates and creditors looking for him. He was last seen in January of this year in Rome, drinking and spending prodigiously at the Hilton Cavalieri and Excelsior hotels. He is now believed by private investigators, who have been searching for him to serve papers on behalf of creditors, to be in the UK and watching his back. Meanwhile, in the eye of the storm, the McCanns continue the search for their lost daughter
TAL&QUAL, Lisbon weekly newspaper
Friday, 14 July 2000
Translated from the original Portuguese article by the author, Frederico Duarte
"My telephones, faxes and e-mails might already be under surveillance," he told a Tal&Qual reporter this week with a shrug of shoulders that shows his perfect awareness of the situation.
Originally from Lisbon, where he was born 40 years ago, Carlos Coelho was president of the Young Social-Democrats and became the youngest MP in Europe at the age of 19 when he replaced the late MP Natália Correia in the Portuguese national parliament. His personality is marked by a very peculiar sense of humour that makes him, for instance, wear ties with rabbit images (in Portuguese Coelho = rabbit), which is enough to break with protocol rules in the most serious situations.
Carlos Coelho was also one of the youngest Portuguese government member when he was the under-secretary to the minister of Education Manuela Ferreira Leite. Now, his election for "first-vigilant" of Echelon is due to the fact that he¹s a member of the Committe on Citizen¹s Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs at the EP.
On the other hand, if our man in Strasbourg faces any difficulty penetrating the complex world of espionage, he can always hope for advice from his colleague and leader of the PSD MP¹s at the EP, Pacheco Pereira, the author of the introductory text of the Portuguese version of the most polemical espionage book since the end of the Cold War: The Mitrokhin Archive, which will be published next November in Portugal.
Industrial espionage
Carlos Coelho is going to co-ordinate a group of 36 MPs for a year, starting next September. "There's a system which is organized and controlled by the American secret services which has the capacity to intercept practically all forms of communication of voice and data at a planetary scale," Carlos Coelho said last March to the European Committee, in Brussels.
After the Berlin Wall fell and the end of Cold War between the United States and the former USSR, this powerful surveillance system known as Echelon "was directed not with purely military and defence intentions, but with commercial, industrial and tecnological goals," the Portuguese MP also said.
Several journalistic investigations about Echelon, the most recent made by Duncan Campbell, shows well how information gathered by the spy satellites from the USA ruined important business of European companies. In 1994, for instance, the system intercepted telephone calls between the French company Thomson-CSF and the Brasilian SIVAM to negotiate a surveillance system in the Amazon jungle. After those telephone interceptions, bribe allegations were raised that the French had tried to buy over a member of the Brasilian governmental board. In the end, the business went to the American company Raytheon, the same that is in charge of the maintenance and engineering services of the American Echelon base in Sugar Grove, Virginia, in the US.
A year later it was the turn of the aviation company Airbus, also French, to be the victim of the action of the US spies.
According to the Duncan Campbell report the American satellites got access to every fax and telephone call between Airbus, the government and members of the air force of Saudi Arabia. The agents found that the French were offering a bribe to a Saudi official. Thanks to this information, the Americans won the 6 billion dollar business that went to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas.
Allies
One additional problem for Carlos Coelho is that one of the partners of the Americans on this spy system is the United Kingdom, also a member of the European Union. "If France tells us that we can't have acess to certain information because they consider it to be a state secret, we are not going to insist on the request. As for UK, the case might be different...," explained Carlos Coelho this week to Tal&Qual.
"In September, I will start co-ordinating the group, first asking the nations involved on Echelon for the necessary co-operation. Only afterwards will I see what can be done in face of the answers that we will get from those countries," added the same Euro MP.
The origins of Echelon date to 1947, when the secret services of the UK and USA created the UKUSA agreement. The intention was to watch the movements of the nations that after Word War II were left behind the iron curtain raised by the communists from Moscow.
As years went by, the antennas of the UKUSA agreement spread to the allied countries of Canada, Australia and New Zeland, creating a privileged net of Anglo-Saxon information. Excluded from this group are the other powerful European nations such as France, Italy and Germany.
Abbreviations
For the study about Echelon it's better to forget CIA. The name to remember for this information net is NSA -- National Security Agency. Created in 1952, NSA's main goal is just to gather information. It has no agents like CIA, and doesn¹t make international operations able to inspire espionage romances like the mythical John Le Carré. But, in order to get an idea about how effective they are, let's just state the fact that it was the NSA which found the exact location of the Argentinian guerrilla Che Guevara when he was in Bolivia, information that led to his death.
For the most part members at NSA are recruited from the Air Force, Navy and Army. Only a small number are the civilian.
As for the English, forget the lesser and lesser secret services of MI5 and James Bond's MI6. Now the abbreviation is GCHQ -- Government Communications Headquarters. But, let's not assume that on this game there's any kind of loyalty. One example: the NSA men at the American embassy in London do spy on the diplomatic talks of their allies at UKUSA. It's a spy world.
Well informed sources
In order to know more about the world of espionage, and in particular about Echelon, the best place where Carlos Coelho might start looking is the internet site ... This place is managed by John Young, a New York architect that, without geting a penny for it, publishes every day documents that arrive to him from every part of the world. His archive is large and has the most diverse information on cryptography, news, articles and documents about actions made by several "intelligence" services of several nations. The archive is available on-line and can be very precious to our Euro MP.
On the other side, in case Carlos Coelho think it might be necessary, he can always call to testify on his committtee the former British secret agent of MI5, David Shayler, that now lives in a farm near Paris and that can not return to the UK. The former agent, in case he returns home, faces the risk of being arrested because he revealed less than correct actions of the secret services while he worked there. David Shayler will also be able to explain to the committee how easy it is for the British services to spy inside and, mainly, outside their borders.
Frederico Duarte is a 27-year-old journalist at Tal&Qual since 1996. Mr. Duarte is preparing a book on Michael John Smith who was convicted in 1993 of charges by the British Government that he was a spy for the KGB. Mr. John Smith was sentenced to 25 years and is now in Full Sutton Prison, York.
Friday, 14 July 2000
Translated from the original Portuguese article by the author, Frederico Duarte
Coelho under surveillance
The European Parliament has chosen the Portuguese European Parliament Member MP Carlos Coelho to lead the investigation on "Echelon,", the worldwide eavesdropping system. The Portuguese is going to be the man that, for a year, will be under the most stringent surveillance of the world of espionageThe Portuguese European Parliament Member, Carlos Coelho, of PSD (Partido Social Democrata, Social-Democrat Party, member of the Christian Democrat group in the European Parlament-EP), newly-appointed president of the investigation committee of the EP that, starting in September, will investigate the Echelon spy system, will be the most watched man in the world during the next year.
"My telephones, faxes and e-mails might already be under surveillance," he told a Tal&Qual reporter this week with a shrug of shoulders that shows his perfect awareness of the situation.
Originally from Lisbon, where he was born 40 years ago, Carlos Coelho was president of the Young Social-Democrats and became the youngest MP in Europe at the age of 19 when he replaced the late MP Natália Correia in the Portuguese national parliament. His personality is marked by a very peculiar sense of humour that makes him, for instance, wear ties with rabbit images (in Portuguese Coelho = rabbit), which is enough to break with protocol rules in the most serious situations.
Carlos Coelho was also one of the youngest Portuguese government member when he was the under-secretary to the minister of Education Manuela Ferreira Leite. Now, his election for "first-vigilant" of Echelon is due to the fact that he¹s a member of the Committe on Citizen¹s Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs at the EP.
On the other hand, if our man in Strasbourg faces any difficulty penetrating the complex world of espionage, he can always hope for advice from his colleague and leader of the PSD MP¹s at the EP, Pacheco Pereira, the author of the introductory text of the Portuguese version of the most polemical espionage book since the end of the Cold War: The Mitrokhin Archive, which will be published next November in Portugal.
Industrial espionage
Carlos Coelho is going to co-ordinate a group of 36 MPs for a year, starting next September. "There's a system which is organized and controlled by the American secret services which has the capacity to intercept practically all forms of communication of voice and data at a planetary scale," Carlos Coelho said last March to the European Committee, in Brussels.
After the Berlin Wall fell and the end of Cold War between the United States and the former USSR, this powerful surveillance system known as Echelon "was directed not with purely military and defence intentions, but with commercial, industrial and tecnological goals," the Portuguese MP also said.
Several journalistic investigations about Echelon, the most recent made by Duncan Campbell, shows well how information gathered by the spy satellites from the USA ruined important business of European companies. In 1994, for instance, the system intercepted telephone calls between the French company Thomson-CSF and the Brasilian SIVAM to negotiate a surveillance system in the Amazon jungle. After those telephone interceptions, bribe allegations were raised that the French had tried to buy over a member of the Brasilian governmental board. In the end, the business went to the American company Raytheon, the same that is in charge of the maintenance and engineering services of the American Echelon base in Sugar Grove, Virginia, in the US.
A year later it was the turn of the aviation company Airbus, also French, to be the victim of the action of the US spies.
According to the Duncan Campbell report the American satellites got access to every fax and telephone call between Airbus, the government and members of the air force of Saudi Arabia. The agents found that the French were offering a bribe to a Saudi official. Thanks to this information, the Americans won the 6 billion dollar business that went to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas.
Allies
One additional problem for Carlos Coelho is that one of the partners of the Americans on this spy system is the United Kingdom, also a member of the European Union. "If France tells us that we can't have acess to certain information because they consider it to be a state secret, we are not going to insist on the request. As for UK, the case might be different...," explained Carlos Coelho this week to Tal&Qual.
"In September, I will start co-ordinating the group, first asking the nations involved on Echelon for the necessary co-operation. Only afterwards will I see what can be done in face of the answers that we will get from those countries," added the same Euro MP.
The origins of Echelon date to 1947, when the secret services of the UK and USA created the UKUSA agreement. The intention was to watch the movements of the nations that after Word War II were left behind the iron curtain raised by the communists from Moscow.
As years went by, the antennas of the UKUSA agreement spread to the allied countries of Canada, Australia and New Zeland, creating a privileged net of Anglo-Saxon information. Excluded from this group are the other powerful European nations such as France, Italy and Germany.
Abbreviations
For the study about Echelon it's better to forget CIA. The name to remember for this information net is NSA -- National Security Agency. Created in 1952, NSA's main goal is just to gather information. It has no agents like CIA, and doesn¹t make international operations able to inspire espionage romances like the mythical John Le Carré. But, in order to get an idea about how effective they are, let's just state the fact that it was the NSA which found the exact location of the Argentinian guerrilla Che Guevara when he was in Bolivia, information that led to his death.
For the most part members at NSA are recruited from the Air Force, Navy and Army. Only a small number are the civilian.
As for the English, forget the lesser and lesser secret services of MI5 and James Bond's MI6. Now the abbreviation is GCHQ -- Government Communications Headquarters. But, let's not assume that on this game there's any kind of loyalty. One example: the NSA men at the American embassy in London do spy on the diplomatic talks of their allies at UKUSA. It's a spy world.
Well informed sources
In order to know more about the world of espionage, and in particular about Echelon, the best place where Carlos Coelho might start looking is the internet site ... This place is managed by John Young, a New York architect that, without geting a penny for it, publishes every day documents that arrive to him from every part of the world. His archive is large and has the most diverse information on cryptography, news, articles and documents about actions made by several "intelligence" services of several nations. The archive is available on-line and can be very precious to our Euro MP.
On the other side, in case Carlos Coelho think it might be necessary, he can always call to testify on his committtee the former British secret agent of MI5, David Shayler, that now lives in a farm near Paris and that can not return to the UK. The former agent, in case he returns home, faces the risk of being arrested because he revealed less than correct actions of the secret services while he worked there. David Shayler will also be able to explain to the committee how easy it is for the British services to spy inside and, mainly, outside their borders.
Frederico Duarte is a 27-year-old journalist at Tal&Qual since 1996. Mr. Duarte is preparing a book on Michael John Smith who was convicted in 1993 of charges by the British Government that he was a spy for the KGB. Mr. John Smith was sentenced to 25 years and is now in Full Sutton Prison, York.
Mr. Duarte has researched and written on intelligence and espionage since 1992, when his interest was stimulated by the John Smith case that had connections with Oporto, Portugal, Mr. Duarte's hometown. Mr. Duarte has found information on the John Smith case not presented during the trial which supports Mr. John Smith's claims of innocence. He welcomes additional information on the case. Send to: fredericoduarte@lycos.com
Thursday, June 6, 2013
INTELLIGENCE
The great age of code breaking is over -- and with it much of our ability to track the communications of our enemies
Within days of the September 11 attacks U.S. intelligence agencies were being blamed in many quarters for their failure to detect the terrorists' plans in advance. Mistakes in the formulation and execution of intelligence policy were no doubt made. Yet there is no one to blame for what is probably by far the greatest setback in recent years to American capabilities for keeping tabs on terrorists: the fact that it is now virtually impossible to break the encrypted communication systems that PCs and the Internet have made available to everyone -- including, apparently, al Qaeda. The real culprits behind this intelligence failing are the advance of technology and the laws of mathematics.
For more than a decade the National Security Agency has been keenly aware that the battle of wits between code users and code breakers was tipping ineluctably in favor of the code users. Their victory has been clinched by the powerful encryption software now incorporated in most commercial e-mail and Web-browser programs.
It has always been theoretically possible to produce a completely unbreakable code, but only at considerable inconvenience. In the 1920s two groups of code users, Soviet spies and German diplomats, became aware of the vulnerability of their existing systems and began to rely on what are known as one-time pads. In this system sender and receiver are supplied with matching pages containing strings of numbers; each page is used as a key for encoding and decoding a single message and then discarded. If properly used, this scheme is unbreakable, Yet in practice corners were invariably cut, because the system was logistically complicated, involving -- among other things -- teams of couriers to deliver new onetime pads as the old ones were used up.
Until the end of the twentieth century any more practical coding system that could be devised was susceptible to a basic flaw that a skilled code breaker could exploit. Language is extremely patterned -- certain letters and words occur far more often than others. The essential task of a code key is to disguise that non-randonmess. The key might, for example, consist of a long string of random numbers specifying where in the alphabet each letter of the message text should be shifted. If the first letter of the message were A and the first key number 3, then that A would become D in the coded version of the text; if the fourth letter were A and the fourth key number 5, then that A would become F; and so on. Many schemes were developed to provide users with very long key strings, in an attempt to approach the security offered by the one-time pad. Some systems used code books containing tens of thousands of key numbers; others, such as the famous German Enigma machine of World War II, used rotating wheels containing wires and electrical contacts to generate a sequence of permutations.
Yet eventually some of the strings of key would have to be used in more than one message, and when they were, the underlying patterns of language would begin to glow dimly through. The history of twentieth-century code breaking is at its heart the development of a series of increasingly sophisticated mathematical methods to detect non-randomness. The best code breakers were usually able to keep pace with the latest advances in code making, because of the practical limitations of producing very long strings of truly random, non-repeating key. The Enigma machine could be reset each day to one of a million million million million different key-string permutations, yet because of the machine's reliance on mechanically rotating wheels, those different combinations were not completely random or independent; subtle mathematical relationships connected one combination to another, and Allied code breakers were able to develop a brilliant mathematical technique that required them to test only a few thousand different combinations to break each day's setting. In effect, they discovered a shortcut, much like a safecracker's using a stethoscope to listen to the tumblers fall rather than attempting the "brute force" approach of trying every single combination.
But the postwar advent of general-purpose computers -- stimulated by funding from the NSA -- began a process that by the end of the century gave code makers an unassailable lead.
At first, when the extremely high price of computers ensured that government agencies would always have a commanding technological lead over the public, computers enabled the code breakers to abandon much subtlety in favor of brute force: the computers could simply run through every possible key setting to find the one that worked. But this was ultimately a losing proposition, because in terms of computing power it is always cheaper and easier to generate longer and longer keys than it is to test longer and longer keys. Once computers became widely available, the game was over.
In 1998 a team of private-sector computer experts built a special-purpose computer that could test 92 billion different key sequences per second in the widely used Data Encryption Standard system, a mainstay of encoding for commercial electronic traffic, such as bank transfers. It took them fifty-six hours to break a message that was encoded in a version of DES that chooses from some 72 quadrillion possible keys for enciphering each message. (The number of possible keys available in a computer-generated code is typically measured in terms of the length of the binary numeral required to specify which key sequence to use; fifty-six bits give about 72 quadrillion combinations, so this version is called 56-bit DES.) That feat was hailed as a great technological triumph, and it undoubtedly was one. It was also clearly intended to make a statement -- mainly, that DES, which the U.S. government had promulgated, was deliberately designed to keep ordinary code users from employing anything too hard for the NSA to break. But there was an utterly trivial fix that DES users could employ if they were worried about security: they could simply encrypt each message twice, turning 56-bit DES into 112-bit DES, and squaring the number of key sequences that a code breaker would have to try. Messages could even be encrypted thrice; and, indeed, many financial institutions at the time were already using "Triple DES."
Issued in 1977, DES was originally implemented in a computer chip, which made it possible at least in principle to control the spread of encryption technology through export restrictions. Huge increases in the processing power of PCs, however, subsequently made it easy to realize much more complex encryption schemes purely in software, and the Internet made it practically impossible to prevent the rapid spread of' such software to anyone who wanted it. Today most Web browsers use 128-bit encryption as the basic standard; a brute-force attack would take the world's fastest supercomputer something like a trillion years at present. If someone develops a supercomputer that is twice as fast, a code user need only start using 129-bit encryption to maintain the same relative advantage.
The standard e-mail encryption software, supplied with most computers, is the PGP ("pretty good privacy") system. In its latest version it is actually considerably better than pretty good. Users can select 2048-bit (equivalent to a little less than 128-bit DES) or even 4096-bit (equivalent to significantly more than 128-bit DES) keys.
Osama bin Laden's network is suspected of employing additional methods to veil its communications. Some reports suggest that a1 Qaeda not only used encrypted e-mail but also hid encrypted message texts within picture files or other data that could be downloaded from a Web site.
The implications of this fundamental shift in the balance of cryptologic power between the spies and the spied-upon are profound. Before World War II most Western governments, and their military officials looked on intelligence with considerable contempt if they paid attention to it at all. Information from paid spies has always been notoriously unreliable -- colored by ineptness, by a mercenary calculation of what the customer wants to hear, and sometimes by outright deceit. The explosion of intelligence from decoded enemy signals that took place during World War II, however, revolutionized both the profession of intelligence gathering and its impact. Signals intelligence was information coming unfiltered from the mouth of the enemy; its objectivity and authenticity were unparalleled. The proof was in the payoff. The victory at Midway, the sinking of scores of Japanese and German submarines, the rout of Rommel across North Africa, the success of D-Day -- all depended directly and crucially on intelligence from decoded Axis communications.
Signals intelligence is not completely dead, of course: bad guys make mistakes; they sometimes still use the phone or radio when they need to communicate in a hurry; and a surprising amount of useful intelligence can be gleaned from analyzing communication patterns even if the content of the communications is unreadable. Still, if encrypted-signals intelligence is to continue to provide information about enemy plans and organization, it must be accompanied by a significant increase in direct undercover operations. A hint of things to come emerged this past summer in the federal criminal trial of Nicodemo Scarfo Jr., who faces charges of running gambling and loan-sharking operations for the Gambino crime family. Federal agents, discovering that Scarfo kept records of his business in encrypted files on his PC, obtained a court order to surreptitiously install on his computer what was identified in court papers as a "key-logger system." The system (whether hardware or software is unclear) apparently recorded every keystroke typed into the computer, eventually enabling FBI agents to recover the password Scarfo used with his encryption software. Planting such electronic bugs directly in computers, or perhaps even sabotaging encryption software with a "back door" that code breakers could exploit, would generally require direct access to the machines. A plan proposed by the Clinton Administration would have obviated the need for direct access. But the plan, which would have required all American makers of encryption software to install a back door accessible by U.S. intelligence agencies acting with court approval, was abandoned, in part because of the argument that the requirement would not apply to foreign software makers, who are now perfectly capable of equaling the most sophisticated American-made commercial encryption software.
An effort in the Senate to revive that plan and include it in the anti-terrorism bill that was signed into law October 26 received little support and was withdrawn, and on much the same grounds -- that however powerful an intelligence tool code breaking was during its golden age, in World War II and the Cold War, the technical reality is that those days are gone. Code breaking simply cannot work the magic it once did.
Cryptome: Mr. Budiansky is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, based in Leesburg, Virginia. His book on Allied codebreaking in World War II, Battle of Wits, was published in 2000 by The Free Press.
Mr. Budiansky is sufficiently knowledgeable about codebreaking to note that codebreakers never reveal their decrypting capabilities and will go to considerable lengths to hide them or promulgate disinformation so that code users will believe their systems are secure. There have been a fair number of articles promoting the notion of NSA's loss of codebreaking capabilities as public use of encryption increases. This would be consistent with a campaign of disinformation similar to that employed for earlier code-breaking deceptions. Professional cryptographers and computer security specialists remind that code-breaking today is not usually directed against the mathematical strengths of an encryption program but against the program's more vulnerable implementation -- such as the faults of a computer operating system, weaknesses in processor design, poorly chosen obvious passphrases or inadequately protected passphrases. Occasionally the articles report, as does Mr. Budiansky's here, alternative methods employed to bypass encryption (the Scarfo case repeatedly cited as if planned and publicized for that purpose), but not always.
It is probable that some of the methods described for bypassing encryption are disinformative, and disseminated to divert attention from true capabilities of decryption and/or burglary. For example, those used by the Special Collections Service (SCS), a covert unit operated by the CIA and NSA to burgle targeted facilities making use of encryption. The publicized feats of the SCS may be disinformation to conceal decryption capabilities. Sample article on SCS below.
Source: http://www.business20.com/articles/mag/print/0,1643,17511,FF.html
Business 2.0
November 2001
How the shadowy science of signals intelligence, honed in the drug wars, can help us fight terrorism.
The target never had a clue that he was in imminent danger. A high-ranking member of a Kashmiri terrorist group implicated in the World Trade Center attack, he had every reason to believe he had eluded the manhunt. He was lying low in a nondescript safe house on the outskirts of Peshawar in Pakistan's Khyber Pass region. He steered clear of phones and kept to himself. His sole contact with his global ring was through wireless e-mail transmitted by a high-frequency radio running on only eight flashlight batteries. Using that low-powered signal to send messages of only a few words at a time -- keeping transmissions to short bursts -- he was impossible to trace.
Or so he thought.
What the terrorist couldn't know was that signals intelligence operatives had been on his trail for months. His communications network relied on a base station hundreds of miles away in the Afghan desert; that device had been spotted by a robotic spy plane, a U.S. Air Force Predator, that was mapping radio traffic along the mountainous Afghan-Pakistani border from an altitude of 25,000 feet. Thereafter, each radio message he sent brought his fate closer, the final one pinpointed by members of the U.S. antiterrorism unit, Delta Force, who were sweeping his outpost with handheld direction finders. They staked out the house with local commandos and waited. When their man stepped out for some air, they made a visual confirmation and radioed the kill order to a Pakistani sniper team. From a quarter-mile away, a shooter took out the target with a single .50-caliber bullet.
In the shadowy war against the architects of the Sept. 11 atrocity, this is how victory may look. If you think it all sounds too much like a Tom Clancy novel to be true, you're mistaken: The hypothetical scenario above parallels almost exactly the real-life demise on Dec. 2, 1993, of public enemy number one in the U.S. war on drugs, Pablo Escobar. That manhunt ended in Medellmn, of course, not Peshawar, and the infinite justice was administered by Colombian, not Pakistani, commandos. Still, members of the U.S. intelligence community and military say the drug cartel raids of the 1990s are a model for antiterror strategists today. In both campaigns, U.S. special forces advise indigenous troops, who do the actual dirty work. And in both cases, American signals intelligence technology plays a crucial role.
Broadly speaking, signals intelligence (sigint) is the interception, exploitation, and jamming of electronic communication, whether it's radiated through the atmosphere and sea or through fixed lines like the telephone grid. In its 21st-century American application, it is a multibillion-dollar enterprise designed to eavesdrop on the conversations and data traffic of U.S. adversaries anywhere in the world. (However, the law prohibits blanket electronic monitoring of U.S. residents, one reason perhaps that intelligence agencies missed the hundreds of e-mails the Sept. 11 hijackers exchanged with each other from personal computers and public library kiosks.) The listening posts in this worldwide surveillance network range from simple radio antennas wired into sophisticated receivers to P-3 Orion spy planes operated by the U.S. Navy and Customs Service to nuclear submarines like the USSJimmy Carter, which can sit on the ocean floor for weeks at a time tapping undersea fiber-optic cables. The network even extends into space, where at least eight geosynchronous spy satellites vacuum up radio and other waves emanating from earth, beam the captured data to receivers on various continents, and then relay them to the mecca of sigint, the Fort Meade, Md., headquarters of the National Security Agency (NSA). Some of the above listening points feed data into the computers of a Cold War-inspired intelligence cooperative called Echelon, maintained by the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.
Behind the octopuslike network of listening posts is a technological arsenal that would stretch the imagination of Silicon Valley's best engineers. There are instruments known as spectrum analyzers, which are like MRI-scanners for all electromagnetic signals in an area. They not only can find a radio transmitter hidden in the mountains but will tell you its energy source. Data-mining software can comb through hundreds of millions of intercepted e-mail messages, faxes, and phone calls in a matter of minutes to find a single hot-button sequence -- say, the fax number of a suspected terrorist. Most mind-boggling of all is a system that can pick a single voice out of thousands of cell-phone conversations in an area, even if the speaker is constantly switching phones to avoid interception.
At the controls of all of this high-tech gear are specialists who number only a few hundred in the United States and perhaps only 2,000 in the entire world. Not surprisingly, they aren't particularly chatty about their occupation, but it's clear that they're in greater demand than ever. One of the handful of private contractors in the group (most are on the government payroll) told Business 2.0 that he was hired by a three-letter government agency the day of the attacks on New York and Washington, and has worked practically around the clock since. Of his latest assignment, all he will say is "I have to fly somewhere for this job tomorrow, and it won't be on a civilian aircraft."
Steve Uhrig [http://www.swssec.com] is another private sigint contractor, a onetime "spook" with U.S. Naval Intelligence who is now one of the most respected surveillance and technical countermeasure specialists in the world. In other words, he installs bugs and wiretaps, as well as conducts sweeps for them, and designs "black boxes" of spy gear for clients that have ranged from the NSA and the CIA to Tom Clancy himself. (Uhrig spent the summer wiring the author's 440-acre Maryland compound with state-of-the-art surveillance and security gear.) He has not yet been tapped for the war effort. But to the extent that the campaign against the Colombian drug cartels was a rehearsal for the coming showdown with terrorists, Uhrig has a unique perspective on how the new conflict might shape up. After all, the Colombian army is by far his largest customer. Among the surveillance systems he has set up in Colombia is a network of 100 "beeper busters," computer-driven receivers with decoders that can filter both pager numbers and content of interest to authorities in real time. Now the instant a suspected trafficker or money launderer receives a pager message, Colombian army intelligence has a copy of it.
The Escobar takedown shows how U.S. sigint can work with local forces to eliminate bad guys. In 1993 the CIA and a covert U.S. Army unit called Centra Spike spent months in Colombia monitoring Escobar's communications from both the ground and the air, finally pinpointing his location when he made a call from his cell phone. Colombian special forces commandos gunned down the Medellmn cartel leader as he ran barefoot across the rooftop of an apartment building.
Sigint's work against the cocaine cartels evolved into a game of high-tech cat-and-mouse, especially after Escobar's death taught traffickers the vulnerability of cell phones. One of the cartels' countermeasures is to "roll" cell phones to confuse wiretappers. Using scanners, they steal the identities of innocent bystanders' mobile phones and program the "cloned" numbers into their own handsets for a few days at a time. Authorities can't keep track of what phone numbers they should be tapping.
In response, authorities deployed a remarkable surveillance technology that operates over Colombia from spy planes. It uses a series of devices called IF-to-tape converters ("IF" stands for "intermediate frequency"), in conjunction with directional antennas, receivers, and wide-band recorders, to scoop up the major bands across the entire cellular spectrum. Loaded with the proper gear, one aircraft can record all of the cell traffic in a major city by circling it at a high altitude and exploiting the powerful microwave signals that form a handshake between cell sites in wireless networks. Back at the plane's base, a computer extracts audio files of actual conversations from the captured signals. The audio files are then filtered with sophisticated voice recognition software, allowing intelligence analysts to identify all of a suspect's conversations by his voice, no matter how many times he rolls his phones.
According to Uhrig, those kinds of vacuum cleaner technologies will not be as effective against Middle Eastern terrorists. For one thing, Afghanistan has no cellular service. For another, this year's successful prosecution of four terrorists implicated in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa relied heavily on NSA intercepts of cellular and satellite phone calls between terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network. All too aware that its phones were compromised, al Qaeda has reportedly curtailed its use of phones.
Sigint operatives will adapt by trying to move in closer to bin Laden. That delicate and dangerous task is the forte of an unacknowledged U.S. intelligence agency bearing the innocuous name of Special Collections Service (SCS). The agency, housed in Beltsville, Md., a short freeway ride from NSA headquarters, is jointly staffed by the NSA and the CIA. Operating under cover from U.S. embassies around the world, the agency is known for Mission Impossible-style operations -- most famously, hiding bugs on pigeons that perched on windowsills of the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. The SCS is currently working overtime, experts have told Business 2.0, eavesdropping on government communications in Middle East capitals and, where possible, setting up listening posts around figures close to bin Laden's network. "They'll be trying to build a case to show the Taliban's support for al Qaeda," says a retired U.S. special operations colonel who is still involved with the military.
If bin Laden or other suspects try to blend into a densely populated city, they might choose to talk on a radio frequency that they will "snuggle" next to a powerful signal like a local television transmitter. "If you're sweeping the area for a radio, you'll miss it unless you know exactly what you're looking for," says Uhrig, who was the technical consultant for the film Enemy of the State. "A receiver will lock on to the big transmitter." In that case, electronic espionage agents would likely do their hunting with a spectrum analyzer. This device shows a picture on a monitor of all signals, big and small, and can break them down into their component parts much like a chemical analysis of your drinking water.
If, as seems more likely, bin Laden remains holed up in his mountain hideouts, Uhrig surmises that the terrorist leader may use a low-powered high-frequency radio network, whose signals would be drowned in background noise such as that emitted by electronic car ignitions. But sigint doesn't need to capture a whole conversation to make life very tenuous for the broadcaster. In a manhunt, in fact, all it really needs to do is ascertain the coordinates of a target. Modern direction finders can get a bearing on a radio or a cell phone even if they capture a signal lasting as little as 20 milliseconds. In that scenario, a target may meet his end not with a sniper's bullet but with something much louder. Out in the Afghan mountains, says a high-ranking officer formerly in charge of counter-drug operations and surveillance in South America, "there is no reason to put our troops in danger and do a SWAT-style hard takedown. You would just put a high-tech weapon on him -- send a Tomahawk into his cave with a laser detonator."
No one in the military or intelligence communities thinks it will be easy to locate -- let alone stamp out -- the organizations responsible for the attacks on the nation's largest city and its capital. But no criminals in history have had so much electronic weaponry arrayed against them as bin Laden and his cohorts do today. "If bin Laden has anything that creates an RF signal, his ass is grass," says the private sigint specialist who was contracted for the manhunt. "If our boy has any brains at all, the only thing he has on him is his handy Kalishnikov and a copy of the Koran."
LOSING THE CODE WAR
STEPHEN BUDIANSKYThe great age of code breaking is over -- and with it much of our ability to track the communications of our enemies
Within days of the September 11 attacks U.S. intelligence agencies were being blamed in many quarters for their failure to detect the terrorists' plans in advance. Mistakes in the formulation and execution of intelligence policy were no doubt made. Yet there is no one to blame for what is probably by far the greatest setback in recent years to American capabilities for keeping tabs on terrorists: the fact that it is now virtually impossible to break the encrypted communication systems that PCs and the Internet have made available to everyone -- including, apparently, al Qaeda. The real culprits behind this intelligence failing are the advance of technology and the laws of mathematics.
For more than a decade the National Security Agency has been keenly aware that the battle of wits between code users and code breakers was tipping ineluctably in favor of the code users. Their victory has been clinched by the powerful encryption software now incorporated in most commercial e-mail and Web-browser programs.
It has always been theoretically possible to produce a completely unbreakable code, but only at considerable inconvenience. In the 1920s two groups of code users, Soviet spies and German diplomats, became aware of the vulnerability of their existing systems and began to rely on what are known as one-time pads. In this system sender and receiver are supplied with matching pages containing strings of numbers; each page is used as a key for encoding and decoding a single message and then discarded. If properly used, this scheme is unbreakable, Yet in practice corners were invariably cut, because the system was logistically complicated, involving -- among other things -- teams of couriers to deliver new onetime pads as the old ones were used up.
Until the end of the twentieth century any more practical coding system that could be devised was susceptible to a basic flaw that a skilled code breaker could exploit. Language is extremely patterned -- certain letters and words occur far more often than others. The essential task of a code key is to disguise that non-randonmess. The key might, for example, consist of a long string of random numbers specifying where in the alphabet each letter of the message text should be shifted. If the first letter of the message were A and the first key number 3, then that A would become D in the coded version of the text; if the fourth letter were A and the fourth key number 5, then that A would become F; and so on. Many schemes were developed to provide users with very long key strings, in an attempt to approach the security offered by the one-time pad. Some systems used code books containing tens of thousands of key numbers; others, such as the famous German Enigma machine of World War II, used rotating wheels containing wires and electrical contacts to generate a sequence of permutations.
Yet eventually some of the strings of key would have to be used in more than one message, and when they were, the underlying patterns of language would begin to glow dimly through. The history of twentieth-century code breaking is at its heart the development of a series of increasingly sophisticated mathematical methods to detect non-randomness. The best code breakers were usually able to keep pace with the latest advances in code making, because of the practical limitations of producing very long strings of truly random, non-repeating key. The Enigma machine could be reset each day to one of a million million million million different key-string permutations, yet because of the machine's reliance on mechanically rotating wheels, those different combinations were not completely random or independent; subtle mathematical relationships connected one combination to another, and Allied code breakers were able to develop a brilliant mathematical technique that required them to test only a few thousand different combinations to break each day's setting. In effect, they discovered a shortcut, much like a safecracker's using a stethoscope to listen to the tumblers fall rather than attempting the "brute force" approach of trying every single combination.
But the postwar advent of general-purpose computers -- stimulated by funding from the NSA -- began a process that by the end of the century gave code makers an unassailable lead.
At first, when the extremely high price of computers ensured that government agencies would always have a commanding technological lead over the public, computers enabled the code breakers to abandon much subtlety in favor of brute force: the computers could simply run through every possible key setting to find the one that worked. But this was ultimately a losing proposition, because in terms of computing power it is always cheaper and easier to generate longer and longer keys than it is to test longer and longer keys. Once computers became widely available, the game was over.
In 1998 a team of private-sector computer experts built a special-purpose computer that could test 92 billion different key sequences per second in the widely used Data Encryption Standard system, a mainstay of encoding for commercial electronic traffic, such as bank transfers. It took them fifty-six hours to break a message that was encoded in a version of DES that chooses from some 72 quadrillion possible keys for enciphering each message. (The number of possible keys available in a computer-generated code is typically measured in terms of the length of the binary numeral required to specify which key sequence to use; fifty-six bits give about 72 quadrillion combinations, so this version is called 56-bit DES.) That feat was hailed as a great technological triumph, and it undoubtedly was one. It was also clearly intended to make a statement -- mainly, that DES, which the U.S. government had promulgated, was deliberately designed to keep ordinary code users from employing anything too hard for the NSA to break. But there was an utterly trivial fix that DES users could employ if they were worried about security: they could simply encrypt each message twice, turning 56-bit DES into 112-bit DES, and squaring the number of key sequences that a code breaker would have to try. Messages could even be encrypted thrice; and, indeed, many financial institutions at the time were already using "Triple DES."
Issued in 1977, DES was originally implemented in a computer chip, which made it possible at least in principle to control the spread of encryption technology through export restrictions. Huge increases in the processing power of PCs, however, subsequently made it easy to realize much more complex encryption schemes purely in software, and the Internet made it practically impossible to prevent the rapid spread of' such software to anyone who wanted it. Today most Web browsers use 128-bit encryption as the basic standard; a brute-force attack would take the world's fastest supercomputer something like a trillion years at present. If someone develops a supercomputer that is twice as fast, a code user need only start using 129-bit encryption to maintain the same relative advantage.
The standard e-mail encryption software, supplied with most computers, is the PGP ("pretty good privacy") system. In its latest version it is actually considerably better than pretty good. Users can select 2048-bit (equivalent to a little less than 128-bit DES) or even 4096-bit (equivalent to significantly more than 128-bit DES) keys.
Osama bin Laden's network is suspected of employing additional methods to veil its communications. Some reports suggest that a1 Qaeda not only used encrypted e-mail but also hid encrypted message texts within picture files or other data that could be downloaded from a Web site.
The implications of this fundamental shift in the balance of cryptologic power between the spies and the spied-upon are profound. Before World War II most Western governments, and their military officials looked on intelligence with considerable contempt if they paid attention to it at all. Information from paid spies has always been notoriously unreliable -- colored by ineptness, by a mercenary calculation of what the customer wants to hear, and sometimes by outright deceit. The explosion of intelligence from decoded enemy signals that took place during World War II, however, revolutionized both the profession of intelligence gathering and its impact. Signals intelligence was information coming unfiltered from the mouth of the enemy; its objectivity and authenticity were unparalleled. The proof was in the payoff. The victory at Midway, the sinking of scores of Japanese and German submarines, the rout of Rommel across North Africa, the success of D-Day -- all depended directly and crucially on intelligence from decoded Axis communications.
Signals intelligence is not completely dead, of course: bad guys make mistakes; they sometimes still use the phone or radio when they need to communicate in a hurry; and a surprising amount of useful intelligence can be gleaned from analyzing communication patterns even if the content of the communications is unreadable. Still, if encrypted-signals intelligence is to continue to provide information about enemy plans and organization, it must be accompanied by a significant increase in direct undercover operations. A hint of things to come emerged this past summer in the federal criminal trial of Nicodemo Scarfo Jr., who faces charges of running gambling and loan-sharking operations for the Gambino crime family. Federal agents, discovering that Scarfo kept records of his business in encrypted files on his PC, obtained a court order to surreptitiously install on his computer what was identified in court papers as a "key-logger system." The system (whether hardware or software is unclear) apparently recorded every keystroke typed into the computer, eventually enabling FBI agents to recover the password Scarfo used with his encryption software. Planting such electronic bugs directly in computers, or perhaps even sabotaging encryption software with a "back door" that code breakers could exploit, would generally require direct access to the machines. A plan proposed by the Clinton Administration would have obviated the need for direct access. But the plan, which would have required all American makers of encryption software to install a back door accessible by U.S. intelligence agencies acting with court approval, was abandoned, in part because of the argument that the requirement would not apply to foreign software makers, who are now perfectly capable of equaling the most sophisticated American-made commercial encryption software.
An effort in the Senate to revive that plan and include it in the anti-terrorism bill that was signed into law October 26 received little support and was withdrawn, and on much the same grounds -- that however powerful an intelligence tool code breaking was during its golden age, in World War II and the Cold War, the technical reality is that those days are gone. Code breaking simply cannot work the magic it once did.
Cryptome: Mr. Budiansky is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, based in Leesburg, Virginia. His book on Allied codebreaking in World War II, Battle of Wits, was published in 2000 by The Free Press.
Mr. Budiansky is sufficiently knowledgeable about codebreaking to note that codebreakers never reveal their decrypting capabilities and will go to considerable lengths to hide them or promulgate disinformation so that code users will believe their systems are secure. There have been a fair number of articles promoting the notion of NSA's loss of codebreaking capabilities as public use of encryption increases. This would be consistent with a campaign of disinformation similar to that employed for earlier code-breaking deceptions. Professional cryptographers and computer security specialists remind that code-breaking today is not usually directed against the mathematical strengths of an encryption program but against the program's more vulnerable implementation -- such as the faults of a computer operating system, weaknesses in processor design, poorly chosen obvious passphrases or inadequately protected passphrases. Occasionally the articles report, as does Mr. Budiansky's here, alternative methods employed to bypass encryption (the Scarfo case repeatedly cited as if planned and publicized for that purpose), but not always.
It is probable that some of the methods described for bypassing encryption are disinformative, and disseminated to divert attention from true capabilities of decryption and/or burglary. For example, those used by the Special Collections Service (SCS), a covert unit operated by the CIA and NSA to burgle targeted facilities making use of encryption. The publicized feats of the SCS may be disinformation to conceal decryption capabilities. Sample article on SCS below.
Source: http://www.business20.com/articles/mag/print/0,1643,17511,FF.html
Business 2.0
November 2001
Weapons of the Secret War
By: Paul KaihlaHow the shadowy science of signals intelligence, honed in the drug wars, can help us fight terrorism.
The target never had a clue that he was in imminent danger. A high-ranking member of a Kashmiri terrorist group implicated in the World Trade Center attack, he had every reason to believe he had eluded the manhunt. He was lying low in a nondescript safe house on the outskirts of Peshawar in Pakistan's Khyber Pass region. He steered clear of phones and kept to himself. His sole contact with his global ring was through wireless e-mail transmitted by a high-frequency radio running on only eight flashlight batteries. Using that low-powered signal to send messages of only a few words at a time -- keeping transmissions to short bursts -- he was impossible to trace.
Or so he thought.
What the terrorist couldn't know was that signals intelligence operatives had been on his trail for months. His communications network relied on a base station hundreds of miles away in the Afghan desert; that device had been spotted by a robotic spy plane, a U.S. Air Force Predator, that was mapping radio traffic along the mountainous Afghan-Pakistani border from an altitude of 25,000 feet. Thereafter, each radio message he sent brought his fate closer, the final one pinpointed by members of the U.S. antiterrorism unit, Delta Force, who were sweeping his outpost with handheld direction finders. They staked out the house with local commandos and waited. When their man stepped out for some air, they made a visual confirmation and radioed the kill order to a Pakistani sniper team. From a quarter-mile away, a shooter took out the target with a single .50-caliber bullet.
In the shadowy war against the architects of the Sept. 11 atrocity, this is how victory may look. If you think it all sounds too much like a Tom Clancy novel to be true, you're mistaken: The hypothetical scenario above parallels almost exactly the real-life demise on Dec. 2, 1993, of public enemy number one in the U.S. war on drugs, Pablo Escobar. That manhunt ended in Medellmn, of course, not Peshawar, and the infinite justice was administered by Colombian, not Pakistani, commandos. Still, members of the U.S. intelligence community and military say the drug cartel raids of the 1990s are a model for antiterror strategists today. In both campaigns, U.S. special forces advise indigenous troops, who do the actual dirty work. And in both cases, American signals intelligence technology plays a crucial role.
Broadly speaking, signals intelligence (sigint) is the interception, exploitation, and jamming of electronic communication, whether it's radiated through the atmosphere and sea or through fixed lines like the telephone grid. In its 21st-century American application, it is a multibillion-dollar enterprise designed to eavesdrop on the conversations and data traffic of U.S. adversaries anywhere in the world. (However, the law prohibits blanket electronic monitoring of U.S. residents, one reason perhaps that intelligence agencies missed the hundreds of e-mails the Sept. 11 hijackers exchanged with each other from personal computers and public library kiosks.) The listening posts in this worldwide surveillance network range from simple radio antennas wired into sophisticated receivers to P-3 Orion spy planes operated by the U.S. Navy and Customs Service to nuclear submarines like the USSJimmy Carter, which can sit on the ocean floor for weeks at a time tapping undersea fiber-optic cables. The network even extends into space, where at least eight geosynchronous spy satellites vacuum up radio and other waves emanating from earth, beam the captured data to receivers on various continents, and then relay them to the mecca of sigint, the Fort Meade, Md., headquarters of the National Security Agency (NSA). Some of the above listening points feed data into the computers of a Cold War-inspired intelligence cooperative called Echelon, maintained by the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.
Behind the octopuslike network of listening posts is a technological arsenal that would stretch the imagination of Silicon Valley's best engineers. There are instruments known as spectrum analyzers, which are like MRI-scanners for all electromagnetic signals in an area. They not only can find a radio transmitter hidden in the mountains but will tell you its energy source. Data-mining software can comb through hundreds of millions of intercepted e-mail messages, faxes, and phone calls in a matter of minutes to find a single hot-button sequence -- say, the fax number of a suspected terrorist. Most mind-boggling of all is a system that can pick a single voice out of thousands of cell-phone conversations in an area, even if the speaker is constantly switching phones to avoid interception.
At the controls of all of this high-tech gear are specialists who number only a few hundred in the United States and perhaps only 2,000 in the entire world. Not surprisingly, they aren't particularly chatty about their occupation, but it's clear that they're in greater demand than ever. One of the handful of private contractors in the group (most are on the government payroll) told Business 2.0 that he was hired by a three-letter government agency the day of the attacks on New York and Washington, and has worked practically around the clock since. Of his latest assignment, all he will say is "I have to fly somewhere for this job tomorrow, and it won't be on a civilian aircraft."
Steve Uhrig [http://www.swssec.com] is another private sigint contractor, a onetime "spook" with U.S. Naval Intelligence who is now one of the most respected surveillance and technical countermeasure specialists in the world. In other words, he installs bugs and wiretaps, as well as conducts sweeps for them, and designs "black boxes" of spy gear for clients that have ranged from the NSA and the CIA to Tom Clancy himself. (Uhrig spent the summer wiring the author's 440-acre Maryland compound with state-of-the-art surveillance and security gear.) He has not yet been tapped for the war effort. But to the extent that the campaign against the Colombian drug cartels was a rehearsal for the coming showdown with terrorists, Uhrig has a unique perspective on how the new conflict might shape up. After all, the Colombian army is by far his largest customer. Among the surveillance systems he has set up in Colombia is a network of 100 "beeper busters," computer-driven receivers with decoders that can filter both pager numbers and content of interest to authorities in real time. Now the instant a suspected trafficker or money launderer receives a pager message, Colombian army intelligence has a copy of it.
The Escobar takedown shows how U.S. sigint can work with local forces to eliminate bad guys. In 1993 the CIA and a covert U.S. Army unit called Centra Spike spent months in Colombia monitoring Escobar's communications from both the ground and the air, finally pinpointing his location when he made a call from his cell phone. Colombian special forces commandos gunned down the Medellmn cartel leader as he ran barefoot across the rooftop of an apartment building.
Sigint's work against the cocaine cartels evolved into a game of high-tech cat-and-mouse, especially after Escobar's death taught traffickers the vulnerability of cell phones. One of the cartels' countermeasures is to "roll" cell phones to confuse wiretappers. Using scanners, they steal the identities of innocent bystanders' mobile phones and program the "cloned" numbers into their own handsets for a few days at a time. Authorities can't keep track of what phone numbers they should be tapping.
In response, authorities deployed a remarkable surveillance technology that operates over Colombia from spy planes. It uses a series of devices called IF-to-tape converters ("IF" stands for "intermediate frequency"), in conjunction with directional antennas, receivers, and wide-band recorders, to scoop up the major bands across the entire cellular spectrum. Loaded with the proper gear, one aircraft can record all of the cell traffic in a major city by circling it at a high altitude and exploiting the powerful microwave signals that form a handshake between cell sites in wireless networks. Back at the plane's base, a computer extracts audio files of actual conversations from the captured signals. The audio files are then filtered with sophisticated voice recognition software, allowing intelligence analysts to identify all of a suspect's conversations by his voice, no matter how many times he rolls his phones.
According to Uhrig, those kinds of vacuum cleaner technologies will not be as effective against Middle Eastern terrorists. For one thing, Afghanistan has no cellular service. For another, this year's successful prosecution of four terrorists implicated in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa relied heavily on NSA intercepts of cellular and satellite phone calls between terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network. All too aware that its phones were compromised, al Qaeda has reportedly curtailed its use of phones.
Sigint operatives will adapt by trying to move in closer to bin Laden. That delicate and dangerous task is the forte of an unacknowledged U.S. intelligence agency bearing the innocuous name of Special Collections Service (SCS). The agency, housed in Beltsville, Md., a short freeway ride from NSA headquarters, is jointly staffed by the NSA and the CIA. Operating under cover from U.S. embassies around the world, the agency is known for Mission Impossible-style operations -- most famously, hiding bugs on pigeons that perched on windowsills of the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. The SCS is currently working overtime, experts have told Business 2.0, eavesdropping on government communications in Middle East capitals and, where possible, setting up listening posts around figures close to bin Laden's network. "They'll be trying to build a case to show the Taliban's support for al Qaeda," says a retired U.S. special operations colonel who is still involved with the military.
If bin Laden or other suspects try to blend into a densely populated city, they might choose to talk on a radio frequency that they will "snuggle" next to a powerful signal like a local television transmitter. "If you're sweeping the area for a radio, you'll miss it unless you know exactly what you're looking for," says Uhrig, who was the technical consultant for the film Enemy of the State. "A receiver will lock on to the big transmitter." In that case, electronic espionage agents would likely do their hunting with a spectrum analyzer. This device shows a picture on a monitor of all signals, big and small, and can break them down into their component parts much like a chemical analysis of your drinking water.
If, as seems more likely, bin Laden remains holed up in his mountain hideouts, Uhrig surmises that the terrorist leader may use a low-powered high-frequency radio network, whose signals would be drowned in background noise such as that emitted by electronic car ignitions. But sigint doesn't need to capture a whole conversation to make life very tenuous for the broadcaster. In a manhunt, in fact, all it really needs to do is ascertain the coordinates of a target. Modern direction finders can get a bearing on a radio or a cell phone even if they capture a signal lasting as little as 20 milliseconds. In that scenario, a target may meet his end not with a sniper's bullet but with something much louder. Out in the Afghan mountains, says a high-ranking officer formerly in charge of counter-drug operations and surveillance in South America, "there is no reason to put our troops in danger and do a SWAT-style hard takedown. You would just put a high-tech weapon on him -- send a Tomahawk into his cave with a laser detonator."
No one in the military or intelligence communities thinks it will be easy to locate -- let alone stamp out -- the organizations responsible for the attacks on the nation's largest city and its capital. But no criminals in history have had so much electronic weaponry arrayed against them as bin Laden and his cohorts do today. "If bin Laden has anything that creates an RF signal, his ass is grass," says the private sigint specialist who was contracted for the manhunt. "If our boy has any brains at all, the only thing he has on him is his handy Kalishnikov and a copy of the Koran."
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
"Intercepted Messages Call for Al-Qaeda Attacks on Portugal"
"Threat rating: moderate, level 3." That's a non-European information service defines a jihadist communications intercepted on Wednesday that calls for "attacks on major ports [sea] and other Western targets in Portugal". The i confirmed that the July 20 services Portuguese were alerted by information services to foreign counterparts that have arisen at the site of a radical Islamic forum, a message (post) to encourage an "attack on port facilities, shipping lanes and tourists in Portugal."
The degree of elaboration and complexity of the plan described on the Internet, combined with other information and analysis of recent events, take the foreign service to consider that "hostile elements have the ability to hit the target and this action is within the reach of adversarial intent."
The evaluation of the information specialists in Islamic terrorism is that "an attack or action, is probably a priority and may even be prepared." In the message that was intercepted, Portugal is a major terrorist plot that you want to strike "a devastating blow on the economies Western "through attacks directed at" us "of" worldwide shipping routes. "
In the list of targets, Portugal is next to the Suez Canal, the Cape of Good Hope and the Straits of Hormuz. "In the seas and oceans are shipping routes for transport and tourism. If we attack commercial vessels, we can change the system naval routes and raise the cost of marine insurance or even halt the [shipping], especially tourism, "reads the first message written in Arabic intercepted by intelligence services.
A reply message to the first post says: "We should attack the Persian Gulf, is a strategic region, with all those oil tankers. It is very important that the Mujahideen are acting in this region because this will hasten the fall of the infidel states, whose economy will be severely affected obtained through oil in Arab countries. " Arousal Although Portugal and threatens to call specifically target potential terrorist attacks, "the alert level of national security is the same," says the i an expert in the area: "Also because such references to Portugal is not so rare, it happens almost every month. "
Another source close to intelligence services supports a different theory, and states that the "interception of messages with specific references to attacks and direct incentives in Portugal has not happened for some years." The message in question mentions "the Portuguese invaders who insulted Islam and Muslims so elusive." "This barbaric and savage Portugal. The brutality was unique in history. I wish that Al-Qaeda Deliver a sharp blow in Portugal. And I ask Allah to be merciful to al-Qaeda when she does." The current leader of Al-Qaeda, the Egyptian Al-Zawahiri, who happened to Osama bin Laden six weeks after the murder of the mentor of the terrorist organization in Pakistan, advocates a "global jihadist intifada" and has shown a growing interest in Algeria, the base of the former Group Salafist Preaching and Combat, which has become Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Since 2006, Zawahiri in Algeria aims to create a recessed base of al-Qaeda to launch attacks on Portugal, Spain and France.
The attacks against the United States and England use the base set back from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Threat detected the threat of Islamic terrorism is not new in Portugal. The Homeland Security Report 2010 shows that there is "evidence of a growing synergy between al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and criminal groups acting in the Sahel in Africa and submagrebina, particularly at the level of drug trafficking and illegal immigration What sets the increased threat to both Europe's interests, particularly the Portuguese, in the region, both on the European territory. " "It is considered that Portugal is not immune to development in its territory of activities related to the Islamist terrorism.
Among other factors, the presence of Portuguese military contingents in conflict zones such as Afghanistan, can be a motivating factor for cases of violent radicalization of individuals or for the selection of our country as a target for the realization of attacks " it said. Further, the report indicates the "subsistence risk projection for the country's terrorist implanted matrix / active spaces geographically close or where they come from foreign communities resident in Portugal, namely Europe, the Sahel, the Maghreb, or the Indian subcontinent. These risks are extended to the Portuguese communities living abroad and Portuguese foreign presence - of an economic, diplomatic and military
Friday, May 31, 2013
Thursday, May 30, 2013
PEDÓFILOS FAMOSOS, HÁ OS PORTUGUESES QUE NÃO TÊM TEMPO DE DAR UMA QUECA NA MULHER, TIPO O MEU PAI QUE FEZ HORAS EXTRAORDINÁRIAS 25 ANOS ATÉ À MEIA NOITE NA CGA, E HÁ OUTROS...
Processo Casa Pia
DENUNCIADOS OUTROS "ABUSADORES" FAMOSOS
São mais de 200 os nomes que foram referenciados como alegados abusadores de menores na fase de inquérito (investigação) do processo da alegada rede de pedofilia que operava na Casa Pia de Lisboa.
Jorge Sampaio, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Jaime Gama, Ferro Rodrigues, Narana Coissoró, Paulo Portas, Francisco Louça, Chalana, Carlos Manuel, Joaquim Monchique, Medina Carreira, Carlos Monjardino, Vítor de Sousa, Adelino Salvado, Bagão Félix e Valente de Oliveira são apenas algumas das figuras públicas que viram os seus nomes referenciados no processo por várias pessoas interrogadas pelos investigadores da PJ ao serviço do Ministério Público.
Marcelo surpreendido
O professor e comentador televisivo Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa está, por exemplo, referenciado como tendo abusado de um menor e presenciado actos de pedofilia numa casa em Lisboa. Foi acusado, a 8 de Abril de 2003, por uma professora, residente na Margem Sul do Tejo. Segundo a denúncia da docente, ela foi levada à referida casa pelo pai, e lá estaria o professor que assistiu, nas palavras desta mulher, a abusos de menores, tendo ele próprio abusado de um.
A procuradora Paula Soares, uma das titulares do inquérito (juntamente com o procurador João Guerra e a procuradora Cristina Faleiro), foi quem recolheu este depoimento, que, mais tarde, mandou simplesmente apensar ao inquérito principal. A mesma mulher acusou ainda o ex-ministro da Saúde, Luís Filipe Pereira, de ter abusado de menores (de ambos os sexos) numa casa localizada no Estoril e confessou que ela própria agrediu, com um ferro, uma jovem, na mesma casa, estando convencida ainda hoje que a matou.
A procuradora Paula Soares considerou que os factos denunciados eram muito antigos e não estavam relacionados com nenhum dos arguidos, suspeitos ou ofendidos do inquérito da rede de pedofilia, pelo que não ordenou qualquer diligência investigatória, nomeadamente que se procedesse ao interrogatório do pai da suposta vítima a fim de se apurar que casa era aquela e quem era o seu proprietário.
Confrontado com esta acusação, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa mostrou-se surpreendido: “Nunca fui interrogado sobre essa matéria. Nem sabia que tinha sido referenciado. Tinha conhecimento que a minha fotografia aparecia num álbum que foi mostrado às vítimas e até achei isso muito bem. De qualquer forma, essa acusação não faz o mínimo sentido. Não conheço essa pessoa de lado nenhum.”
Testemunhos desvalorizados
Muitos dos testemunhos e denúncias recolhidos pela equipa de investigadores que trabalharam na fase de inquérito do processo foram desvalorizados, apesar de alguns deles terem testemunhado em tribunal contra alguns dos arguidos que foram a julgamento, nomeadamente contra Ferreira Diniz, Jorge Ritto e Carlos Cruz.
Uma das testemunhas que acusou estes três arguidos (baptizado por alguma Comunicação Social como João A., tratando-se na realidade de Ricardo Oliveira, actualmente com cerca de 30 anos, julgado em 2007 por assaltos a várias residências na região de Sintra e referenciado pelas autoridades como estando ligado ao narcotráfico) denunciou à PJ outros alegados abusadores, nomeadamente Paulo Pedroso, Ferro Rodrigues, Jaime Gama, Fernando Chalana e Carlos Manuel, tendo mesmo indicado uma casa em Cascais, no Bairro do Rosário, onde terá sido abusado e filmado em práticas sexuais por Ferro Rodrigues, Jaime Gama e Jorge Ritto.
Uma outra testemunha/vítima, que acusa todos os arguidos de abusos na casa de Elvas, onde agora, de acordo com a sentença, apenas Carlos Cruz terá praticado abusos, denunciou à PJ Carlos Mota, antigo “assessor” de Carlos Cruz.
As testemunhas que terão sido abusadas em Elvas referiram também à PJ abusos praticados por outras pessoas, nomeadamente por outros funcionários da Casa Pia, por colegas mais velhos e pelo antigo provedor Luís Rebelo, que foi demitido do cargo na sequência do escândalo.
Curiosamente, apesar de ser referenciado nos autos como abusador e de ter estado mais de duas décadas à frente da Casa Pia, nomeadamente na altura em que terão ocorrido os abusos que foram agora julgados, o ex-provedor nunca foi interrogado pelas autoridades na fase de inquérito.
Outros jovens foram claros, quando interrogados pela equipa que investigava a pedofilia na Casa Pia de Lisboa, em denunciar como alegados abusadores de menores Joaquim Monchique, Francisco Louça, Medina Carreira, Narana Coissoró, Paulo Portas, Vítor de Sousa e Carlos Monjardino, entre outros. Todos foram acusados pelas testemunhas/vítimas como frequentadores assíduos do Parque Eduardo VII, onde “arranjariam” os menores de quem abusavam.
Felícia Cabrita deu vários nomes
Quem também contribui para engrossar a lista de nomes de suspeitos de pedofilia foi a jornalista Felícia Cabrita, autora da notícia que esteve na origem do escândalo.
Ouvida pelas autoridades a 16 de Janeiro de 2003, duas semanas antes da detenção de Carlos Cruz, Hugo Marçal e Ferreira Diniz, a jornalista revelou que tinha denúncias contra dois cozinheiros da Casa Pia, Jorge Ritto, Carlos Cruz e Fernando Pessa.
Felícia entregou ainda à PJ um papel que lhe terá sido dado pela antiga secretária de Estado Teresa Costa Macedo, onde aquela denunciava o advogado Lawdes Marques, os doutores Eduardo Matias e André Gonçalves Pereira, os embaixadores António Monteiro e Brito e Cunha, bem como Carlos Cruz e João Quintela.
Isabel Raposo, a meia-irmã de Carlos Silvino, também escreveu uma carta à procuradora Paula Soares, que consta do processo, onde denuncia Pedro Roseta e o irmão, Valente de Oliveira, Martins da Cruz, Narana Coissoró, Paulo Portas, Bagão Félix e Adelino Salvado, entre outros.
DENUNCIADOS OUTROS "ABUSADORES" FAMOSOS
São mais de 200 os nomes que foram referenciados como alegados abusadores de menores na fase de inquérito (investigação) do processo da alegada rede de pedofilia que operava na Casa Pia de Lisboa.
Jorge Sampaio, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Jaime Gama, Ferro Rodrigues, Narana Coissoró, Paulo Portas, Francisco Louça, Chalana, Carlos Manuel, Joaquim Monchique, Medina Carreira, Carlos Monjardino, Vítor de Sousa, Adelino Salvado, Bagão Félix e Valente de Oliveira são apenas algumas das figuras públicas que viram os seus nomes referenciados no processo por várias pessoas interrogadas pelos investigadores da PJ ao serviço do Ministério Público.
Marcelo surpreendido
O professor e comentador televisivo Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa está, por exemplo, referenciado como tendo abusado de um menor e presenciado actos de pedofilia numa casa em Lisboa. Foi acusado, a 8 de Abril de 2003, por uma professora, residente na Margem Sul do Tejo. Segundo a denúncia da docente, ela foi levada à referida casa pelo pai, e lá estaria o professor que assistiu, nas palavras desta mulher, a abusos de menores, tendo ele próprio abusado de um.
A procuradora Paula Soares, uma das titulares do inquérito (juntamente com o procurador João Guerra e a procuradora Cristina Faleiro), foi quem recolheu este depoimento, que, mais tarde, mandou simplesmente apensar ao inquérito principal. A mesma mulher acusou ainda o ex-ministro da Saúde, Luís Filipe Pereira, de ter abusado de menores (de ambos os sexos) numa casa localizada no Estoril e confessou que ela própria agrediu, com um ferro, uma jovem, na mesma casa, estando convencida ainda hoje que a matou.
A procuradora Paula Soares considerou que os factos denunciados eram muito antigos e não estavam relacionados com nenhum dos arguidos, suspeitos ou ofendidos do inquérito da rede de pedofilia, pelo que não ordenou qualquer diligência investigatória, nomeadamente que se procedesse ao interrogatório do pai da suposta vítima a fim de se apurar que casa era aquela e quem era o seu proprietário.
Confrontado com esta acusação, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa mostrou-se surpreendido: “Nunca fui interrogado sobre essa matéria. Nem sabia que tinha sido referenciado. Tinha conhecimento que a minha fotografia aparecia num álbum que foi mostrado às vítimas e até achei isso muito bem. De qualquer forma, essa acusação não faz o mínimo sentido. Não conheço essa pessoa de lado nenhum.”
Testemunhos desvalorizados
Muitos dos testemunhos e denúncias recolhidos pela equipa de investigadores que trabalharam na fase de inquérito do processo foram desvalorizados, apesar de alguns deles terem testemunhado em tribunal contra alguns dos arguidos que foram a julgamento, nomeadamente contra Ferreira Diniz, Jorge Ritto e Carlos Cruz.
Uma das testemunhas que acusou estes três arguidos (baptizado por alguma Comunicação Social como João A., tratando-se na realidade de Ricardo Oliveira, actualmente com cerca de 30 anos, julgado em 2007 por assaltos a várias residências na região de Sintra e referenciado pelas autoridades como estando ligado ao narcotráfico) denunciou à PJ outros alegados abusadores, nomeadamente Paulo Pedroso, Ferro Rodrigues, Jaime Gama, Fernando Chalana e Carlos Manuel, tendo mesmo indicado uma casa em Cascais, no Bairro do Rosário, onde terá sido abusado e filmado em práticas sexuais por Ferro Rodrigues, Jaime Gama e Jorge Ritto.
Uma outra testemunha/vítima, que acusa todos os arguidos de abusos na casa de Elvas, onde agora, de acordo com a sentença, apenas Carlos Cruz terá praticado abusos, denunciou à PJ Carlos Mota, antigo “assessor” de Carlos Cruz.
As testemunhas que terão sido abusadas em Elvas referiram também à PJ abusos praticados por outras pessoas, nomeadamente por outros funcionários da Casa Pia, por colegas mais velhos e pelo antigo provedor Luís Rebelo, que foi demitido do cargo na sequência do escândalo.
Curiosamente, apesar de ser referenciado nos autos como abusador e de ter estado mais de duas décadas à frente da Casa Pia, nomeadamente na altura em que terão ocorrido os abusos que foram agora julgados, o ex-provedor nunca foi interrogado pelas autoridades na fase de inquérito.
Outros jovens foram claros, quando interrogados pela equipa que investigava a pedofilia na Casa Pia de Lisboa, em denunciar como alegados abusadores de menores Joaquim Monchique, Francisco Louça, Medina Carreira, Narana Coissoró, Paulo Portas, Vítor de Sousa e Carlos Monjardino, entre outros. Todos foram acusados pelas testemunhas/vítimas como frequentadores assíduos do Parque Eduardo VII, onde “arranjariam” os menores de quem abusavam.
Felícia Cabrita deu vários nomes
Quem também contribui para engrossar a lista de nomes de suspeitos de pedofilia foi a jornalista Felícia Cabrita, autora da notícia que esteve na origem do escândalo.
Ouvida pelas autoridades a 16 de Janeiro de 2003, duas semanas antes da detenção de Carlos Cruz, Hugo Marçal e Ferreira Diniz, a jornalista revelou que tinha denúncias contra dois cozinheiros da Casa Pia, Jorge Ritto, Carlos Cruz e Fernando Pessa.
Felícia entregou ainda à PJ um papel que lhe terá sido dado pela antiga secretária de Estado Teresa Costa Macedo, onde aquela denunciava o advogado Lawdes Marques, os doutores Eduardo Matias e André Gonçalves Pereira, os embaixadores António Monteiro e Brito e Cunha, bem como Carlos Cruz e João Quintela.
Isabel Raposo, a meia-irmã de Carlos Silvino, também escreveu uma carta à procuradora Paula Soares, que consta do processo, onde denuncia Pedro Roseta e o irmão, Valente de Oliveira, Martins da Cruz, Narana Coissoró, Paulo Portas, Bagão Félix e Adelino Salvado, entre outros.
Justiça de Portugal condena pastor por comércio de substância radioativa
O Tribunal da Relação da Cidade do Porto , em Portugal confirmou a condenação a 4 anos e 10 meses de prisão, com pena suspensa, do pastor da Igreja Kharisma Leonel Ferreira, por tráfico de urânio 235, substância radioactiva capaz de produzir explosão nuclear, informa a Agência Lusa.
Além da questão do urânio, que lhe valeu uma pena parcelar de quatro anos de prisão pelo crime de detenção de arma proibida, Leonel Ferreira foi ainda condenado a 2 anos e 6 meses por participação econômica em negócio.
Segundo o tribunal, deste crime resultou um prejuízo de cerca de 120 mil euros para os Samaritanos, uma Instituição Particular de Solidariedade Social (IPSS) da qual Leonel Ferreira era presidente.
Em cúmulo jurídico, o Tribunal de Gaia aplicou 4 anos e 10 meses de prisão, uma pena de que o arguido recorreu, mas que foi agora confirmada pelo Tribunal da Relação do Porto.
Os fatos remontam a 1997, data em que, segundo os fatos dados como provados pelo tribunal, ‘o arguido iniciou negociações para adquirir urânio 235 na Roméêia’, em articulação com outros três indivíduos, entretanto presos, julgados e condenados em França.
Para formar esta convicção, o tribunal baseou-se ‘nos vários documentos apreendidos ao arguido, alguns dos quais descritivos dos factos e em registos de chamadas telefônicas, e-mails e fax trocados» entre os três detidos em França e Leonel Ferreira.
Assim, concluiu o Tribunal de Gaia, o pastor terá «procurado obter substância nuclear ou análoga, tendo adquirido urânio 235′, entretanto apreendido em França.
O Comissariado para a Energia Atômica da França analisou o urânio apreendido e identificou-o como urânio 235, ‘muito enriquecido, particularmente puro’.
Segundo um perito do Instituto Tecnológico Nuclear, aquele urânio «’ó pode ser proveniente de laboratórios altamente especializados, existentes em muito poucos países do mundo’.
‘Para o potencial comprador deste tipo de urânio, podem prever-se duas utilizações: o fabrico de uma arma nuclear e o fabrico de um engenho de dispersão da matéria de tipo terrorista’, sublinha o tribunal.
O arguido foi também condenado por ‘participação econômica em negócio’, da qual resultou ‘um avultado prejuízo’ para os Samaritanos.
Segundo o acórdão, Leonel Ferreira criou duas empresas que usou para contratualizar serviços com os Samaritanos, como a ‘compra de bens alimentares para cabazes, cedência de pessoal, serviços de publicidade, entre outros’.
No entanto, concluiu o tribunal, ‘os Samaritanos teriam poupado 24 mil contos [120 mil euros] caso tivessem contratualizado estes serviços diretamente com os fornecedores e não através destas empresas’.
A juíza presidente do colectivo que julgou o caso no Tribunal de Gaia justificou a suspensão da pena por já terem passado mais de 10 anos desde os fatos e por o arguido, que já esteve preso preventivamente, se encontrar ‘integrado’ na sociedade e já não estar em condições de continuar com os crimes pelos quais foi condenado.
Segundo o tribunal, atualmente Leonel Ferreira é pastor da Igreja Kharisma, assim como a mulher, recebendo cada um, de salário, 2.200 euros por mês.
Além da questão do urânio, que lhe valeu uma pena parcelar de quatro anos de prisão pelo crime de detenção de arma proibida, Leonel Ferreira foi ainda condenado a 2 anos e 6 meses por participação econômica em negócio.
Segundo o tribunal, deste crime resultou um prejuízo de cerca de 120 mil euros para os Samaritanos, uma Instituição Particular de Solidariedade Social (IPSS) da qual Leonel Ferreira era presidente.
Em cúmulo jurídico, o Tribunal de Gaia aplicou 4 anos e 10 meses de prisão, uma pena de que o arguido recorreu, mas que foi agora confirmada pelo Tribunal da Relação do Porto.
Os fatos remontam a 1997, data em que, segundo os fatos dados como provados pelo tribunal, ‘o arguido iniciou negociações para adquirir urânio 235 na Roméêia’, em articulação com outros três indivíduos, entretanto presos, julgados e condenados em França.
Para formar esta convicção, o tribunal baseou-se ‘nos vários documentos apreendidos ao arguido, alguns dos quais descritivos dos factos e em registos de chamadas telefônicas, e-mails e fax trocados» entre os três detidos em França e Leonel Ferreira.
Assim, concluiu o Tribunal de Gaia, o pastor terá «procurado obter substância nuclear ou análoga, tendo adquirido urânio 235′, entretanto apreendido em França.
O Comissariado para a Energia Atômica da França analisou o urânio apreendido e identificou-o como urânio 235, ‘muito enriquecido, particularmente puro’.
Segundo um perito do Instituto Tecnológico Nuclear, aquele urânio «’ó pode ser proveniente de laboratórios altamente especializados, existentes em muito poucos países do mundo’.
‘Para o potencial comprador deste tipo de urânio, podem prever-se duas utilizações: o fabrico de uma arma nuclear e o fabrico de um engenho de dispersão da matéria de tipo terrorista’, sublinha o tribunal.
O arguido foi também condenado por ‘participação econômica em negócio’, da qual resultou ‘um avultado prejuízo’ para os Samaritanos.
Segundo o acórdão, Leonel Ferreira criou duas empresas que usou para contratualizar serviços com os Samaritanos, como a ‘compra de bens alimentares para cabazes, cedência de pessoal, serviços de publicidade, entre outros’.
No entanto, concluiu o tribunal, ‘os Samaritanos teriam poupado 24 mil contos [120 mil euros] caso tivessem contratualizado estes serviços diretamente com os fornecedores e não através destas empresas’.
A juíza presidente do colectivo que julgou o caso no Tribunal de Gaia justificou a suspensão da pena por já terem passado mais de 10 anos desde os fatos e por o arguido, que já esteve preso preventivamente, se encontrar ‘integrado’ na sociedade e já não estar em condições de continuar com os crimes pelos quais foi condenado.
Segundo o tribunal, atualmente Leonel Ferreira é pastor da Igreja Kharisma, assim como a mulher, recebendo cada um, de salário, 2.200 euros por mês.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
WikiLeaks revela que Presidente moçambicano, Armando Emílio Guebuza, e antecessor Joaquim Chissano estão envolvidos com o narcotráfico.
O narcotráfico tem uma base segura em Moçambique, rota da cocaína que chega do Brasil, do haxixe do Paquistão e da heroína produzida no Afeganistão, afirmam diplomatas americanos em correspondência divulgada pelo site WikiLeaks e publicada nessa quarta-feira pelo jornal Le Monde.
Após Guiné Bissau, Moçambique se tornou "a segunda praça africana mais ativa no trânsito de narcóticos", disse em 2009 o encarregado de negócios da embaixada americana em Maputo. Moçambique "não é um completo narco-Estado corrupto, mas segue em uma direção inquietante", destaca o diplomata. Segundo o funcionário americano, a cocaína chega "por avião a Maputo procedente do Brasil", e o haxixe e a heroína vêm por via marítima de "Paquistão e Afeganistão".
As drogas alimentam o mercado sul-africano ou seguem para a Europa. O narcotráfico é baseado em duas grandes redes, lideradas pelos moçambicanos de origem asiática Mohamed Bachir Suleiman ("MBS") e Ghulam Rassul Moti, cujas atividades seriam impossíveis sem a cumplicidade do Estado.
"MBS tem laços diretos com o presidente Armando Guebuza e com o ex-presidente Joaquim Chissano", revela um telegrama diplomático de 28 de setembro de 2009 divulgado pelo WikiLeaks. "Suleiman contribuiu em grande parte para financiar a Frelimo (partido do governo) e ajudou significativamente nas campanhas eleitorais" de Guebuza e Chissano.
O diplomata americano explica que "a administração do porto de Nacala, célebre por permitir a passagem de droga procedente do sudeste asiático, foi entregue recentemente a Celso Correira, presidente executivo da Insitec, uma empresa de fachada de Guebuza".
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joaquim chissano/wikileaks
Documentos sobre narcotráfico são "mentira grossa"
por lusa10 Dezembro 2010
O antigo Presidente de Moçambique negou qualquer envolvimento com narcotráfico e classificou os documentos divulgados pelo portal WikiLeaks como "mentira grossa".
"Gostaria de saber em que é que me ligam ao narcotráfico", disse Joaquim Chissano em declarações à Lusa, garantindo que é tudo mentira e que duvida que a embaixada dos Estados Unidos tenha alguma informação. "Diz-se que o Manuel Tomé (líder da bancada parlamentar da FRELIMO, partido no poder) recebia dinheiro e que era meu familiar. Nunca foi meu familiar. O que me parece que dão a entender é que estão a tentar meter o meu nome a todo o custo", afirmou o antigo chefe de Estado moçambicano.
Quanto à acusação de a FRELIMO receber dinheiro de empresários, como de Bachir Suleman, Chissano disse à Lusa que isso sempre foi prática normal de todos os partidos, que em campanhas faziam jantares com empresários, que prometiam determinadas somas.
Joaquim Chissano frisou que a única droga que conhece é a que se produz em Moçambique (cânhamo, conhecida por suruma), e que lhe foi proposta a sua legalização, por ser "suave", quando era Presidente, o que recusou. "Não conheço nomes de drogas, nunca vi, a erva é a única planta que conheço e que recusei que se legalizasse e que se fizesse negócio. Sou completamente contra drogas", frisou.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vieram da guerrilha, sem um tostão. E hoje são milionários. Donde proveio esta fortuna? Querem ver que estava enterrada no mato? Quem vai acreditar em Chissano/Guebuza? Nada vai acontecer, nem a estes corruptos nem às outras situações enunciadas pela WikiLeaks... O mundo está povoado de cobardes.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
O tráfico de drogas é o maior negócio em Moçambique
Numa investigação especial para o metical, Joseph Hanlon analisa a economia de Moçambique dos últimos anos para concluir que muito do seu crescimento é devido ao tráfico de drogas.
(Maputo) - O tráfico de drogas é o maior negócio em Moçambique. O valor das drogas ilegais que passam através de Moçambique representa provavelmente mais do que todo o comércio externo legal combinado, de acordo com peritos internacionais. O rendimento desta actividade, embora não declarado, deve ter hoje um enorme impacto na economia moçambicana. De facto, o dinheiro da droga deve ser um dos factores que pesa no crescimento recorde de Moçambique nos últimos anos.
Moçambique ainda não passa de um actor secundário no cenário internacional da droga. Mas porque se trata de um país muito pobre, estas relativamente pequenas quantidades de dinheiro devem produzir um grande impacto social e económico. Os especialistas estimam que por Moçambique, actualmente, passam por mês mais de uma tonelada de cocaína e heroína. O preço de retalho destas drogas é de cerca de 50 milhões de US$. Parte deste dinheiro, talvez 2,5 milhões de US$, ficam com traficantes dentro de Moçambique.
Este negócio só é possível com o acordo da polícia e funcionários muito importantes de Moçambique. O Guardian de Londres reportou recentemente que o antigo governador de uma província do México recebia 500 000 US$ por cada carregamento de cocaína passando pela sua província. Se o mesmo não se passa em Moçambique, é altura de os altos funcionários renegociarem com os traficantes a sua parte.
O comércio da droga tornou-se importante em Moçambique apenas nos finais dos anos 90 quando os grandes traficantes começaram a procurar rotas alternativas, menos acessíveis ao controlo das agências internacionais. Moçambique passou a ser mais atractivo com o fim da guerra quando se restabeleceram as comunicações através do país. A longa linha costeira, com muitas ilhas e sem marinha, facilita a movimentação de droga. Os baixos salários e o clima de corrupção tornam fácil corromper polícias e outros funcionários.
Os peritos internacionais afirmam que a polícia moçambicana é quase toda corrupta e o aeroporto é considerado "aberto" e acessível a idas e vindas dos portadores de droga. O resultado é que Moçambique é não só um país de trânsito mas também um centro de armazenagem. Como em qualquer negócio, os traficantes precisam de fazer "stocks". Em muitos países isto é arriscado por causa das rusgas a armazéns – mas não em Moçambique. O traficante pode manter a droga aqui armazenada enquanto aguarda encomendas.
Parece haver duas importantes rotas de droga. A heroína movimenta-se do Paquistão para o Dubai para a Tanzânia e para Moçambique, e depois para a Europa. A cocaína vai da Colômbia para o Brasil para Moçambique e segue para a Europa e Ásia de Leste.
Durante muito tempo Moçambique tem sido também grande centro de trânsito para a resina de cânhamo (Cannabis sativa), ou haxixe. As autoridades internacionais consideram-na uma droga leve e dão-lhe menos atenção. Mas ela acrescenta largos milhões de dólares aos lucros dos traficantes.
Quase toda a droga é transportada para fora da África Austral, mas o consumo na África do Sul está em crescimento e os traficantes a partir de Moçambique estão a estabelecer presença no país vizinho. Este comércio deve valer vários milhões de dólares por ano.
Há finalmente o Mandrax (metaquolona) que é consumido quase exclusivamente na África do Sul. Muito do mandrax transita por Moçambique, ou é feito aqui, mas os peritos em drogas dizem que o consumo está em declínio à medida que os consumidores passam para a cocaína.
Como se dispõe do dinheiro:
Os lucros de moçambicanos envolvidos no comércio da droga devem ser de milhões de dólares por ano. Parte deste dinheiro é depositado em bancos no estrangeiro e usado para investimentos no exterior – o que significa que bancos, casas de câmbio e casinos em Moçambique são provavelmente usados para lavagem de dinheiro.
Moçambique tem actualmente 10 bancos e cerca de trinta casas de câmbio, provavelmente mais do que o tamanho da economia legal justificaria. Vários destes bancos parecem ter pouca ligação com a economia interna e fazem os seus lucros à base de transacções cambiais de moeda estrangeira, particularmente proveniente da indústria da ajuda internacional. Não surpreenderia se também fizessem lavagem de dinheiro.
Mas fica em Moçambique uma parte significativa deste dinheiro. Onde?
Algum é usado para consumo – casas e carros de luxo, festas requintadas, etc.
Mas os traficantes tentam também converter uma quantidade substancial de dinheiro da droga em propriedades legais que podem render ou ser vendidas mais tarde, sem que se façam perguntas. Este dinheiro tem provavelmente contribuído para a explosão de novas construções em Maputo (e talvez Nampula ou Pemba). Aí não seriam apenas mansões, mas também novos prédios e hotéis.
O investimento no turismo é útil porque é sempre possível declarar mais hóspedes do que os reais, por exemplo num hotel, e com isto esconder lucros futuros provenientes da droga. Hotéis são também uma base segura para portadores de droga.
O turismo e a banca representam 18 por cento do investimento total dos anos 90, de acordo com um estudo de Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco. Não surpreenderia que uma parte importante dele fosse dinheiro da droga.
Uma área importante de investimento para dinheiro ilegítimo são acções e títulos – o comprador pode pagar em dinheiro com poucas explicações a dar. Mas ao revender títulos e acções, os rendimentos passam a ser honestos.
O presidente da Bolsa de Valores de Moçambique (BVM), Jussub Nurmamade, disse a 7 de Junho que o rápido crescimento da BVM era "único": "começámos com 3 milhões de US$ e ainda não passaram dois anos" – disse aos jornalistas. Hoje o valor das cinco companhias listadas na bolsa mais os títulos do tesouro e dos bancos somam 60 milhões de US$ e Nurmamade prevê chegar aos 100 milhões em Outubro. No ano passado o BIM passou a ser a primeira companhia privada a emitir os seus próprios títulos, que são agora negociados na BVM. A emissão de títulos foi para 80 biliões de Meticais (na altura mais de 5 milhões US$), vencendo em cinco anos.
Como pode uma economia tão pequena como a de Moçambique encontrar 100 milhões de US$ em tão curto espaço de tempo? O que torna Moçambique "único" deve ser o dinheiro da droga.
Assim, olhando para a rapidíssima expansão da banca e da bolsa de valores, o "boom" na construção, o crescimento do investimento no turismo e, finalmente, o aumento do consumo de bens de luxo, podemos provavelmente contabilizar uma porção significativa de dezenas de milhões de dólares anuais de lucros da droga.
(Joseph Hanlon) - METICA
O narcotráfico tem uma base segura em Moçambique, rota da cocaína que chega do Brasil, do haxixe do Paquistão e da heroína produzida no Afeganistão, afirmam diplomatas americanos em correspondência divulgada pelo site WikiLeaks e publicada nessa quarta-feira pelo jornal Le Monde.
Após Guiné Bissau, Moçambique se tornou "a segunda praça africana mais ativa no trânsito de narcóticos", disse em 2009 o encarregado de negócios da embaixada americana em Maputo. Moçambique "não é um completo narco-Estado corrupto, mas segue em uma direção inquietante", destaca o diplomata. Segundo o funcionário americano, a cocaína chega "por avião a Maputo procedente do Brasil", e o haxixe e a heroína vêm por via marítima de "Paquistão e Afeganistão".
As drogas alimentam o mercado sul-africano ou seguem para a Europa. O narcotráfico é baseado em duas grandes redes, lideradas pelos moçambicanos de origem asiática Mohamed Bachir Suleiman ("MBS") e Ghulam Rassul Moti, cujas atividades seriam impossíveis sem a cumplicidade do Estado.
"MBS tem laços diretos com o presidente Armando Guebuza e com o ex-presidente Joaquim Chissano", revela um telegrama diplomático de 28 de setembro de 2009 divulgado pelo WikiLeaks. "Suleiman contribuiu em grande parte para financiar a Frelimo (partido do governo) e ajudou significativamente nas campanhas eleitorais" de Guebuza e Chissano.
O diplomata americano explica que "a administração do porto de Nacala, célebre por permitir a passagem de droga procedente do sudeste asiático, foi entregue recentemente a Celso Correira, presidente executivo da Insitec, uma empresa de fachada de Guebuza".
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joaquim chissano/wikileaks
Documentos sobre narcotráfico são "mentira grossa"
por lusa10 Dezembro 2010
O antigo Presidente de Moçambique negou qualquer envolvimento com narcotráfico e classificou os documentos divulgados pelo portal WikiLeaks como "mentira grossa".
"Gostaria de saber em que é que me ligam ao narcotráfico", disse Joaquim Chissano em declarações à Lusa, garantindo que é tudo mentira e que duvida que a embaixada dos Estados Unidos tenha alguma informação. "Diz-se que o Manuel Tomé (líder da bancada parlamentar da FRELIMO, partido no poder) recebia dinheiro e que era meu familiar. Nunca foi meu familiar. O que me parece que dão a entender é que estão a tentar meter o meu nome a todo o custo", afirmou o antigo chefe de Estado moçambicano.
Quanto à acusação de a FRELIMO receber dinheiro de empresários, como de Bachir Suleman, Chissano disse à Lusa que isso sempre foi prática normal de todos os partidos, que em campanhas faziam jantares com empresários, que prometiam determinadas somas.
Joaquim Chissano frisou que a única droga que conhece é a que se produz em Moçambique (cânhamo, conhecida por suruma), e que lhe foi proposta a sua legalização, por ser "suave", quando era Presidente, o que recusou. "Não conheço nomes de drogas, nunca vi, a erva é a única planta que conheço e que recusei que se legalizasse e que se fizesse negócio. Sou completamente contra drogas", frisou.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vieram da guerrilha, sem um tostão. E hoje são milionários. Donde proveio esta fortuna? Querem ver que estava enterrada no mato? Quem vai acreditar em Chissano/Guebuza? Nada vai acontecer, nem a estes corruptos nem às outras situações enunciadas pela WikiLeaks... O mundo está povoado de cobardes.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
O tráfico de drogas é o maior negócio em Moçambique
Numa investigação especial para o metical, Joseph Hanlon analisa a economia de Moçambique dos últimos anos para concluir que muito do seu crescimento é devido ao tráfico de drogas.
(Maputo) - O tráfico de drogas é o maior negócio em Moçambique. O valor das drogas ilegais que passam através de Moçambique representa provavelmente mais do que todo o comércio externo legal combinado, de acordo com peritos internacionais. O rendimento desta actividade, embora não declarado, deve ter hoje um enorme impacto na economia moçambicana. De facto, o dinheiro da droga deve ser um dos factores que pesa no crescimento recorde de Moçambique nos últimos anos.
Moçambique ainda não passa de um actor secundário no cenário internacional da droga. Mas porque se trata de um país muito pobre, estas relativamente pequenas quantidades de dinheiro devem produzir um grande impacto social e económico. Os especialistas estimam que por Moçambique, actualmente, passam por mês mais de uma tonelada de cocaína e heroína. O preço de retalho destas drogas é de cerca de 50 milhões de US$. Parte deste dinheiro, talvez 2,5 milhões de US$, ficam com traficantes dentro de Moçambique.
Este negócio só é possível com o acordo da polícia e funcionários muito importantes de Moçambique. O Guardian de Londres reportou recentemente que o antigo governador de uma província do México recebia 500 000 US$ por cada carregamento de cocaína passando pela sua província. Se o mesmo não se passa em Moçambique, é altura de os altos funcionários renegociarem com os traficantes a sua parte.
O comércio da droga tornou-se importante em Moçambique apenas nos finais dos anos 90 quando os grandes traficantes começaram a procurar rotas alternativas, menos acessíveis ao controlo das agências internacionais. Moçambique passou a ser mais atractivo com o fim da guerra quando se restabeleceram as comunicações através do país. A longa linha costeira, com muitas ilhas e sem marinha, facilita a movimentação de droga. Os baixos salários e o clima de corrupção tornam fácil corromper polícias e outros funcionários.
Os peritos internacionais afirmam que a polícia moçambicana é quase toda corrupta e o aeroporto é considerado "aberto" e acessível a idas e vindas dos portadores de droga. O resultado é que Moçambique é não só um país de trânsito mas também um centro de armazenagem. Como em qualquer negócio, os traficantes precisam de fazer "stocks". Em muitos países isto é arriscado por causa das rusgas a armazéns – mas não em Moçambique. O traficante pode manter a droga aqui armazenada enquanto aguarda encomendas.
Parece haver duas importantes rotas de droga. A heroína movimenta-se do Paquistão para o Dubai para a Tanzânia e para Moçambique, e depois para a Europa. A cocaína vai da Colômbia para o Brasil para Moçambique e segue para a Europa e Ásia de Leste.
Durante muito tempo Moçambique tem sido também grande centro de trânsito para a resina de cânhamo (Cannabis sativa), ou haxixe. As autoridades internacionais consideram-na uma droga leve e dão-lhe menos atenção. Mas ela acrescenta largos milhões de dólares aos lucros dos traficantes.
Quase toda a droga é transportada para fora da África Austral, mas o consumo na África do Sul está em crescimento e os traficantes a partir de Moçambique estão a estabelecer presença no país vizinho. Este comércio deve valer vários milhões de dólares por ano.
Há finalmente o Mandrax (metaquolona) que é consumido quase exclusivamente na África do Sul. Muito do mandrax transita por Moçambique, ou é feito aqui, mas os peritos em drogas dizem que o consumo está em declínio à medida que os consumidores passam para a cocaína.
Como se dispõe do dinheiro:
Os lucros de moçambicanos envolvidos no comércio da droga devem ser de milhões de dólares por ano. Parte deste dinheiro é depositado em bancos no estrangeiro e usado para investimentos no exterior – o que significa que bancos, casas de câmbio e casinos em Moçambique são provavelmente usados para lavagem de dinheiro.
Moçambique tem actualmente 10 bancos e cerca de trinta casas de câmbio, provavelmente mais do que o tamanho da economia legal justificaria. Vários destes bancos parecem ter pouca ligação com a economia interna e fazem os seus lucros à base de transacções cambiais de moeda estrangeira, particularmente proveniente da indústria da ajuda internacional. Não surpreenderia se também fizessem lavagem de dinheiro.
Mas fica em Moçambique uma parte significativa deste dinheiro. Onde?
Algum é usado para consumo – casas e carros de luxo, festas requintadas, etc.
Mas os traficantes tentam também converter uma quantidade substancial de dinheiro da droga em propriedades legais que podem render ou ser vendidas mais tarde, sem que se façam perguntas. Este dinheiro tem provavelmente contribuído para a explosão de novas construções em Maputo (e talvez Nampula ou Pemba). Aí não seriam apenas mansões, mas também novos prédios e hotéis.
O investimento no turismo é útil porque é sempre possível declarar mais hóspedes do que os reais, por exemplo num hotel, e com isto esconder lucros futuros provenientes da droga. Hotéis são também uma base segura para portadores de droga.
O turismo e a banca representam 18 por cento do investimento total dos anos 90, de acordo com um estudo de Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco. Não surpreenderia que uma parte importante dele fosse dinheiro da droga.
Uma área importante de investimento para dinheiro ilegítimo são acções e títulos – o comprador pode pagar em dinheiro com poucas explicações a dar. Mas ao revender títulos e acções, os rendimentos passam a ser honestos.
O presidente da Bolsa de Valores de Moçambique (BVM), Jussub Nurmamade, disse a 7 de Junho que o rápido crescimento da BVM era "único": "começámos com 3 milhões de US$ e ainda não passaram dois anos" – disse aos jornalistas. Hoje o valor das cinco companhias listadas na bolsa mais os títulos do tesouro e dos bancos somam 60 milhões de US$ e Nurmamade prevê chegar aos 100 milhões em Outubro. No ano passado o BIM passou a ser a primeira companhia privada a emitir os seus próprios títulos, que são agora negociados na BVM. A emissão de títulos foi para 80 biliões de Meticais (na altura mais de 5 milhões US$), vencendo em cinco anos.
Como pode uma economia tão pequena como a de Moçambique encontrar 100 milhões de US$ em tão curto espaço de tempo? O que torna Moçambique "único" deve ser o dinheiro da droga.
Assim, olhando para a rapidíssima expansão da banca e da bolsa de valores, o "boom" na construção, o crescimento do investimento no turismo e, finalmente, o aumento do consumo de bens de luxo, podemos provavelmente contabilizar uma porção significativa de dezenas de milhões de dólares anuais de lucros da droga.
(Joseph Hanlon) - METICA
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